Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/222

200 combatants and all their female followers rent the air, and when forcibly separated neither was to be appeased by proffered peanuts. Then a small sister of the petunia coat dashed forward and dealt the green-apple boy such a clap on the ear that the female parliament was paralyzed. When we presented the intrepid little woman with some annas of admiration our dumfounded bearer asked, "Why do such curious thing?" and afterward tried half-heartedly to explain to the crouching women that it was our testimonial to the first woman in India with any backbone. With laughter, the four wives, the two daughters, and the wrinkled old nurse in pewter jewelry, who were with the father of the little "new woman," promised to keep her in the habit of resenting tyrant man and redressing promptly all the wrongs that came to her notice.

The garden rang with jingling anklets, and the play of colors was kaleidoscopic. Two beautiful young women raised their white head-sheets to look at us as they passed, red shoes and full yellow skirts and much coin jewelry making them fantastic figures fit for a fancy-dress ball. Scores of women flounced by in red skirts, green skirts, changeable silk skirts with tinsel borders, and wearing purple, green, yellow, and white head-sheets. A nautch-girl came jingling by, her pale-blue skirts the only touch of that color in the whole garden. After we had seen the tombs in the mosaic pavilion, whose inlaid walls were the first to be decorated in pietra dura in India, we mounted to the terrace roof around the upper story of the marble reliquary,