Page:Letters from India Vol 1.djvu/344

 Another domestic event in the morning was unlike England, though it happens constantly here. Captain had turned off one of the servants for being absent three weeks without leave, and these dismissed people, after moaning and sighing about the gates of Government House for a week, if they find Captain  inexorable, generally contrive to come to me; and, if they can, they bring a train of the old servants to beg for them, and they cry like children and fling themselves on the floor and knock their heads against it; though I have now forewarned my jemadar that he must condition with all his petitioners that they are to stand up and speak out in a manly way, or I cannot see them. They have a way when they are in disgrace of spreading their turbans about them, that I think remarkably interesting, and it does just as well as if I understood every word of their apologies. This man yesterday, besides an interesting discomposed turban and a train of yellow servants with clasped hands, looking as if they were all going to be hanged, brought his old mother to cry for him. It is not very common to see a native female (not a servant), and this old creature was huddled up