Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/215

Rh kites who hover in the air, watching for an opportunity to secure their fair proportion of the articles exposed for sale. If scraps of meat are thrown in the air, the kites, swooping down, catch them in their bills; and should they miss them, the crows will not. One is reminded of the chief baker's dream, in which he thought he had three baskets on his head,—"and in the uppermost basket all manner of bakemeats for Pharoah, and the birds did eat them out of my basket upon my head,"—when he sees the kites darting down upon the meat carried on coolies' heads through the streets of Madras, and carrying off a portion when it is not well secured.

A visit to the beach, at Madras, never failed to excite my admiration and interest. A hard, red road runs parallel with the open sea, and just above the sandy beach on which the waves are ceaselessly breaking. No one, with the least susceptibility to impressions of beauty and grandeur in the works of God, could fail to look with delight upon the endless succession of billows that rolling onward from the horizon of waters, swell, comb, and burst in green sheets, to form again and roll onward still, again to burst and again to advance, till they dash with a hoarse thunder on the sparkling