Page:Letters from India Vol 1.djvu/353

 to sit on the balcony in a draught after the sun goes down than to attempt a drive, only it seems so stupid not to go out for two or three months. I think it so clever of the natives that when I went out on Monday, I found the chair in which we are carried upstairs in the hot season ready at my bedroom door to carry me downstairs to the carriage—a remarkably unpleasant operation, but I did not like to refuse it as it was their own thought.

It is the Mohurram festival, and we are going up to Barrackpore with hardly any servants, as they all ask for holidays this week. My jemadar brought his boy to show off in his festival dress—a black and white turban, with an aigrette of spiky black feathers tipped with silver, silver necklaces, a black and white kummerbund tied round his waist, and a row of silver bells over that, and his face whitened with flour, to look like a faquecr. The boy is naturally frightful, and this made him look like a negro Grimaldi, and I could hardly help laughing when the jemadar walked him jingling his bells up and down the room with an air of paternal triumph, and then proposed I should draw his picture. ‘His mother made a vow before she born him that he