Page:Under the Sun.djvu/118

94 in their pity for her, turned her into the great white moon-plant, which, clinging to her father’s porch, still waits in the evenings with upturned face for the truant’s kiss. For myself, I think they look like saucers. At all events, they are not, according to English tastes, the fit blossom of Christmas time. But then English tastes are not fit for Christmas time in India. The season of frost and ice and snow suggests to us fires, furs, and mulled port-wine; reminds us of skating on ice-covered ponds and dancing in holly-bright rooms. The Christmas bills are a skeleton to some; but even with the butcher, the baker, and the grocer dancing a cannibalic war-dance at the area-gate, there is hardly a home where Christmas is not “merry,” and Hans Andersen’s sexton, who struck the boy for laughing on Christmas Eve, is considered a prodigy of infamy. But “the cold weather,” as we in India are pleased to call the months at the end and beginning of the year, does not suggest mirthfulness to our Aryan brother; it shrivels him up. Months ago, when the sun was killing the northern blood within us, the lizards lay happily basking on the hot stones, the coppery danais flitted at ease about the shrubs, above which the air of mid-day stood shimmering and tremulous with heat, and our Aryan brothers, stretched in the shade of tree and wall, were content with God’s earth. But now that the crisp morning air lends vigor to English limbs, making home intolerable and a wild out-door life a necessity, the lizard has shrunk into a crack of the wall, the danais is hybernating, and our Aryan brother creeps about his daily avocations with the desiccated appearance of a frozen frog, or sits in dormouse torpidity with his knees about his ears. The revenge of the Briton is delicious to him, and in the cold weather