Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/636

616 shave their hair off. They say it cools them. You never hear of a sunstroke.

We will now turn into the main street of Madras. The large building to the left is a sort of emporium, where every thing is sold. The building on the right is the Bank of Madras. Passing through this, at the end we come to the bazaar, and we will just pass through a corner of it and see one or two of the shops, such as everybody is obliged to use if he is not prepared to go to one of the few Europeans in the place. There you see the cap used by the natives as a substitute for a hat—it is nothing but a piece of linen folded in a peculiar shape. You see the two men who are making these caps are wearing similar ones. Another shop is that of a native tailor. The natives themselves never wear much that requires any shaping, and consequently there is little for them to do in the way of cutting out. But they are wonderfully good hands, nevertheless.

Having passed these, we soon get to the hotel, hoping to find peace and rest. But when the Peninsular and Oriental steamers come in everybody knows it, and hundreds of the natives are on the lookout to get money. They see what hotel you go to, and then begins the cry for bakshish—nothing but bakshish. But first of all let us look at the picota, the machine that is used for drawing water. There it is, and the natives run along the top of the long pole to press it down, and then they turn round and run backward and foreward, keeping the machine at work all day; and in the rice-season it is very disagreeable, and even perfect purgatory, to live near where one of these machines is, and hear the two bits of wood rubbing together, and going on "cah, cah" all night and all day. It drives you almost mad. Woe betide the unhappy fellow who gets a bed near one of these picotas.

Arrived at the hotel, you find a lot of fellows asking for bakshish, and playing drums. You give them some money, only too glad to be rid of them. They are succeeded by fellows who play tricks with some stuff dipped in turpentine, through which a man jumps backward and forward. When they are gone, they are succeeded by a conjurer who shows you the way to get rid of your wife if you have got one; or, if you have not, the way you can if you get one and don't like her. He ties the woman up tightly in a net first, and, when he has done that, he puts a basket on the ground. He then takes the top off, and proceeds to put her into the basket. There is the unhappy wife in the basket. The little boy plays the tom-tom, beating it all the time, the fellow standing looking on. As soon as the woman is packed up, he covers up the basket, and, seizing a sword, he plunges it in. The woman shrieks and yells frightfully, the blood pours out in torrents, the ladies who are looking on faint, and the gentlemen curse and swear, and pull him away. When they tear open the basket, they find it empty, and the woman comes out of the house where you are staying