Page:Under the Sun.djvu/119

Rh he triumphs over the Aryan brother who in May and June was rustling comfortably in gauze and muslin. The morning ride or walk when the air is keen is to him (pace Charles Lamb!) as a passage of the Red Sea, every native an Egyptian; and he laughs, like King Olaf at the thin beggar, to see the wretched Hindoo, robbing his spare legs to protect his head, pass by silent with the misery of cold. At night he finds them curled into inconceivable spaces under their blankets, — and such blankets! a network of rough strings with hairs stretching across the interstices, the very ghosts of blankets, at which Witney would hold its woolly sides with laughter. And with many-folded cloths round his benumbed head, over all the blanket, the Hindoo walks deaf under your horse’s nose, stands before your buggy-wheels like a frostbitten paddy-bird. The Tamils call the paddy-bird the “blind idiot.” On a December morning the pompous chuprassie has no more self-respect than a sparrow or a hill sheep, and a child may play with a constable as men handle a hybernating cobra. The fat bunyas are no more seen lolling beneath their shameeanas; the Hindoo, in short, is “occultated.”

In the shop yonder, where earthen vessels are sold, — a shilling would buy the whole stock-in-trade, — with the walls festooned with chalky-surfaced chiliums, the floor piled high with clay pots, sits the owner, frozen and voluminously swathed. He is not proud of his shop; there is none of the assumption of the thriving merchant