Page:Lieut Gullivar Jones - His Vacation - Edwin Arnold (1905).djvu/241

 Once I remember seeing a squatting, life-size heathen idol hoisted from a vessel's hold and deposited on a sugar-box on a New York quay. Some ribald passer-by put a battered felt hat upon Vishnu's sacred curls, and there the poor image sat, an alien in an indifferent land, a sack across its shoulders, a "billycock" upon its head, and honoured at most with a passing stare. I thought of that lonely image as almost as lonely I stood on the Thither men's quay, without the support of friends or heroics, wondering what to do next.

However, a cheerful disposition is sometimes better than a banking account, and not having the one I cultivated the other, sunning myself amongst the bales for a time, and then, since none seemed interested in me, wandered off into the town, partly to satisfy my curiosity, and partly in the vague hope of ascertaining if my princess was really here, and, if possible, getting sight of her.

Meanwhile it turned hot with a supernatural, heavy sort of heat altogether, I overheard passers-by exclaiming, out of the common, and after wandering for an hour through gardens and endless streets of thatched huts, I was glad enough to throw myself down in the shadow of some trees on the outskirts of the great central pile of buildings, a whole village in itself of beam-built towers and dwelling-place, suggesting by its