Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/345

1858.] or messengers, kitmudgars or waiters, to Garden Reach; palanquin-bearers, the smaller fry of banyans or shopkeepers, and dandees or boatmen, to the Ghauts; together with no end of coolies, and bheestees or water-carriers, horse-dealers, and syces or grooms, to Durumtollah; sailors, British and American, Malay and Lascar, to Flag Street, the quarter of punch-houses;—but in Cossitollah all castes and vocations are met, whether their talk be of gold mohurs or cowries; here the Sahib gives the horrid leper a wide berth, and the Baboo walks carefully round the shadow of Mehtur, the sweeper. Therefore, reader, Cossitollah is by all means the street for you to draw profound conclusions from.

Come, let us sit in the window and observe; it is but forty puffs of a No. 3 cheroot, in a lazy palanquin, from one end of Cossitollah to the other; and from our window, though not exactly midway, but nearer the Bazaar, we can see from Flag Street wellnigh to the Midaun.

What is this? A close palkee, with a passenger; the bearers, with elbows sharply crooked, and calves all varicose, trotting to a monotonous, jerking ditty, which the sirdar, or leader, is impudently improvising, to the refrain of Putterum, ("Easy now!") at the expense of their fare's amour-propre.

Out of the way there!

Putterum.

This is a Rajah!

Putterum.

Very small Rajah!

Putterum.

Sixpenny Rajah!

Putterum.

Holes in his elbows!

Putterum.

Capitan Slipshod!

Putterum.

Son of a sea-cook!

Putterum.

Hush! he will beat us!

Putterum.

Hush! he will kick us!

Putterum.

Kick us and curse us!

Putterum.

Not he, the greenhorn!

Putterum.

Don't understand us!

Putterum.

Don't know the lingo!

Putterum.

Let's shake the palkee!

Putterum.

Rattle the pig's bones!

Putterum.

Set down the palkee!

Putterum.

Call him a great lord!

Putterum.

Ask him for buksheesh!

Putterum."

And the four consummate knaves do set down the palkee, and shift the pads on their shoulders; while the sirdar slips round to the sliding-door, and timidly intruding his sweaty phiz, at an opening sufficiently narrow to guard his nose against assault from within, but wide enough to give us a glimpse, through an out-bursting cloud of cheroot-smoke, of a pair of stout legs encased in white duck, with the neatest of light pumps at the end of them, says:—

"Buksheesh do, Sahib! buksheesh do! O favorite slave of the Lord! O tender shepherd of the poor! O sublime and beautiful Being, upon whose turban Prosperity dances and Peace makes her bed! Whose mother is twin-sister to the Sacred Cow, and whose grandmother is the Lotos of Seven Virtues! O Khodabund! buksheesh do! Bestow upon thy abject and self-despising slave wherewithal to commemorate the golden hour when, by a blessed dispensation, he was permitted to lay his trembling forehead against thy victorious feet!"

"Jou-jehennum, toom sooa!—Go to Gehenna, you pig! What are you bothering about, with your 'boxes,' 'boxes,' nothing but 'boxes'? Insatiable brutes! Jou! I tell you,—jeldie jou! or by Doorga, the goddess of awful rows, I'll smash the palkee and outrage all your religious prejudices! Jou!"

Evidently our varicose friends imagine they have caught a Tartar, and that the white ducks are not so recent an importation as they at first supposed; for