Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/641

1858.] little feet, and lighted the hubble-bubble, that he might smoke, they mounted him on a buffalo, captured from the village hurkaru, who happened, just in the nick of time, to come riding by, on his way to Delhi, with the mail. And they led out the prisoner, smoking his hubble-bubble, —and looking, as Metcalfe Sahib said of the real Nawab, “as if he had been accustomed to be hanged every day of his life,”—to the place of execution, an old saul-tree with low limbs. Then, having taken the rope with which the hurkaru’s mail-bag was lashed to his buffalo, they slipped a noose over the Nawab’s head, made the other end fast to the lower limb of the saul-tree, and led away the buffalo.

Little Mungloo, who was canning as a Thug, acted with surprising talent; in fact, some of the Sahibs thought he rather overdid his part, for he dropped his hubble-bubble almost awkwardly, and even kicked,—which the real Nawab had too much self-respect to do,—so that he sent one of his slippers flying one way, and the other another. But he choked, and gasped, and showed the whites of his eyes, and turned black in the face, and shivered through all his frame, so very naturally, that his admiring companions clapped their hands vehemently, and cried, Wah, wah! with all their little lungs. Wah, wah! they screamed,—''Wah khoob tamasha kurta hi! Phir kello, Mungloo! Bahoot uchi-turri nuhkul, kurte ho toom!'' “Bravo! Bravo! Such fun! Do it again, Mungloo,—do it again! it takes you!” Certainly Mungloo did it to the life,—for he was dead.

To conclude now with a specimen of the tales with which the native story-tellers entertain little heathens on street-corners.

There was once a bastard boy, the son of a Brahmin’s widow; and he was excluded from a merry wedding-feast on account of his disgraceful birth. With a heart full of bitterness, he prayed to Siva for comfort or revenge; and Siva, taking pity on him, taught him the mystic mantra, or incantation, called Bijaksharam,— Shrurn, hrim, craoom, hroom, hroo. So the boy went to the door of the apartment where the wedding guests were regaling themselves and making merry; and he pronounced the mantra backwards,—Hroo, hroom, craoom, hrim, shrum. Immediately the fish, and the cucumbers, and the mangoes, and the pumplenoses took the shape of toads, and jumped into the faces of the guests, and into their bosoms and laps, and on the floor. Then the boy laughed so loud, that the astonished guests knew it was he who had conjured them; so they went to the door and let him in, and set him at the head of the table. Then the boy was satisfied, and uttering the mantra aright, he conjured the toads back into the dishes again; and they all lay down in their places, and became fish, and cucumbers, and mangoes, and pumplenoses, just as if nothing had happened.

Glory to Siva!