Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/125

Rh arms, one wonders how one of them can do the heavy work of dock-yards, harbors, railway yards, and iron foundries. Everything is hoisted on the head and shoulder, and so little is carried in the hand that handles are superfluous ornaments on luggage. One meets grand pianos and packing-cases of equal size carried on the heads of eight and twelve men, who step together with locked arms. I watched one coolie's seven attempts to carry ten pasteboard boxes from one shop counter to another. Each time he heaped the load on one arm his draped head-sheet fell away. Each time he reflung the sheet the boxes dropped from the limp arm, and the alternating play went on, until one would have expected an employer to deal blows—or for any rational creature to throw away the sheet and get to work. Centuries have not evolved a way of tying or pinning the woman's veil fast, and weary housekeepers describe the ayah's efforts to make a bed and keep her veil in place as an alternating affair like that of my coolie and the ten boxes.

The curse of caste and all the difficulties its observance implies further complicate dealings with these people, and a century of enlightened rule has not freed them from its tyranny. The railway has done something toward leveling castes, but for the journey only. Instead of reviling and recoiling from the railway as an invention of the defiling European for the express purpose of destroying caste, the Brahman artfully calls steam one of the thousand and eight uncatalogued manifestations of Vishnu. He conceals his sacred thread, washes off