Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/233

Rh at our inn, myself in a superior, sunless, fireless, cheerless room, which was but a long, whitewashed vault with a carefully curtained door opening on a brick portico. Drafts that were small gales blew through, making reading, writing, or anything but sneezing impossible. The peddlers marked us for their own that day, and every few moments there was a tap on the glass door, a brown hand was thrust in with some object for sale; and a plaintive "memsahib" or "ladyship" distracted one. "Please buy. Please buy. I am poor man," rang in my ears all day, and the transfer of packs from the bricks outside to the dirty matting within was accomplished imperceptibly. I was first aware of some pleading, whining creature with a shop spread on the floor around him—silver, jewelry, embroideries, shawls, beetle-winged gauzes, gay pulkharries, and souvenir spoons. Every day a huge damascened fork or trident was offered me as I passed in or out,—whether a dagger or an elephant goad I could not say. "Oh, yes, your ladyship," said the oily one in answer, "this is toast-fork. Very nice. Very comfortable thing for traveling. Please buy. I am poor man." But he and his tribe were ordered to begone, and as the toast-master shuffled out with his bundle he paused at the threshold to slip into his Mohammedan shoes, using the big fork for a shoe-horn. "Very useful. See, your ladyship," he said, adjusting the second shoe with the combination toasting-fork, "Silputs [slippers] help on, also."

When the sky cleared in the late afternoon we betook ourselves to the fort to await the rose-red