Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/13

 picked up from me with surprising quickness. Also he grew to be very clever in modelling queer monkey-folk and monsters, Rakshases and Apsaras, and painted them to the proper pitch of frightfulness or beauty.

The first figure we finished to our satisfaction was a life-size Krishna leaning against a white cow, and playing on the flute; but most of the groups we made were only half life-size. Subjects were plentiful enough, but we stuck to those that are best known. There's scarcely a passage in the "Ramayana" or the "Mahabarat" that you can't find a country picture for. Most English people in India know something about these endless yarns; but very few have any idea of the way they are rooted in the people's minds. For my part, I soon get lost in those wildernesses, but my clients read all the tableaux off easier than if they were printed books. Ram Narrayen, my manager, wrote a little book in Marathi about our "Mirror of Two Worlds," and we had it translated into Bengali and Urdu and illustrated with lithographic pictures; and it brings in about twenty rupees a month steadily. And you may imagine that the twenty-three groups we fitted up with costly dresses and appropriate scenery cost me both time and money.

The great advantage of this kind of Show is that painted figures don't ask for wages; don't run away to get married or burn their mothers; and a score of 'em travel comfortably in a box without quarreling. You are forced to keep a lot of people in this country in any state of life. My head man Ram Narrayen I picked up, sorely down on his luck, at Trimbuk, selling charms for small-pox and toothache, telling fortunes, and generally dodging round the crowd on the look-out for what he could pick up. One naturally cocks one's ears when a half-naked Brahmin in the midst of a yelling crowd of worshippers accosts you with a quotation from Shakspeare. So we talked it over, sitting on a warm rock; and he has been with me ever since. He is a Senoy Brahmin by caste, educated at Dr. Wilson's school, where they must have had a Scotch master for his Marathi-English has a queer "lowland Doric" twang about it; a born rolling-stone, Sir, adventurous, easily pleased, pleasing other people easily, ready of tongue and handy with his fingers; but rather slack in what one might call his moral joints. But when we have little difficulties—about receipts