Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/341

Rh well be put in a museum of last-century crudities. Yet here fashion and arrogance abide from March to November, and the gayest social life goes on, despite the frightful thunder- and hail-storms—rains that are nearly water-spouts and cloud-bursts, and that continue for three months.

It was like turning the pages of "Plain Tales from the Hills" even to read the street signs as we lumbered about that crescent ridge of the summer capital. Jakko, the Mall, the Ladies' Mile, Elysium Hill, and all the rest were there, and we traveled the same road that Mr. Isaacs and the fair English girl rode together. There were the shops of jewelers,—in one of which Kim and the other boy counted the loose stones in trays,—shops of silk, silver, and curio merchants, of milliners and pastry-cooks, all boarded fast for the winter, and behind them the ramshackle buildings of the native bazaar dropped along the hillsides in crazy terraces. There were English villas and cottages, and nothing Oriental or truly Indian in the aspect of the place, and we had a stranger's feeling. Our slow-moving coolies were barefooted and barelegged, and when they stepped aside from the beaten track of slush to let bullock-trains pass, they often stood more than ankle deep in snow. As the setting sun played a fire-pageant over the line of snow-peaks, the chill mountain air penetrated our wraps and rugs, but the red-cheeked English girls in cotton shirt-waists strolled slowly home with their tennis rackets, as if it were a day in June. How we wished we might go with them; that they would ask us to follow on and