The heat was pitiless, the flat plains were destitute of grass, and baked

dry by the sun they were the color of pale dust, which was flying in

clouds. But it was much hotter than this when the relieving forces

marched to Lucknow in the time of the Mutiny. Those were the days of 138

deg. in the shade.

CHAPTER, LVIII.

Make it a point to do something every day that you don't want to do.

This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty

without pain.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

It seems to be settled, now, that among the many causes from which the

Great Mutiny sprang, the main one was the annexation of the kingdom of

Oudh by the East India Company—characterized by Sir Henry Lawrence as

“the most unrighteous act that was ever committed.” In the spring of

1857, a mutinous spirit was observable in many of the native garrisons,

and it grew day by day and spread wider and wider. The younger military

men saw something very serious in it, and would have liked to take hold

of it vigorously and stamp it out promptly; but they were not in

authority. Old men were in the high places of the army—men who should

have been retired long before, because of their great age—and they

regarded the matter as a thing of no consequence. They loved their

native soldiers, and would not believe that anything could move them to

revolt. Everywhere these obstinate veterans listened serenely to the

rumbling of the volcanoes under them, and said it was nothing.

And so the propagators of mutiny had everything their own way. They

moved from camp to camp undisturbed, and painted to the native soldier

the wrongs his people were suffering at the hands of the English, and

made his heart burn for revenge. They were able to point to two facts of

formidable value as backers of their persuasions: In Clive's day, native

armies were incoherent mobs, and without effective arms; therefore, they

were weak against Clive's organized handful of well-armed men, but the

thing was the other way, now. The British forces were native; they had

been trained by the British, organized by the British, armed by the

British, all the power was in their hands—they were a club made by

British hands to beat out British brains with. There was nothing to

oppose their mass, nothing but a few weak battalions of British soldiers

scattered about India, a force not worth speaking of. This argument,

taken alone, might not have succeeded, for the bravest and best Indian

troops had a wholesome dread of the white soldier, whether he was weak or

strong; but the agitators backed it with their second and best point—

prophecy—a prophecy a hundred years old. The Indian is open to prophecy

at all times; argument may fail to convince him, but not prophecy. There

was a prophecy that a hundred years from the year of that battle of

Clive's which founded the British Indian Empire, the British power would

be overthrown and swept away by the natives.

The Mutiny broke out at Meerut on the 10th of May, 1857, and fired a

train of tremendous historical explosions. Nana Sahib's massacre of the

surrendered garrison of Cawnpore occurred in June, and the long siege of

Lucknow began. The military history of England is old and great, but I

think it must be granted that the crushing of the Mutiny is the greatest

chapter in it. The British were caught asleep and unprepared. They were

a few thousands, swallowed up in an ocean of hostile populations. It

would take months to inform England and get help, but they did not falter

or stop to count the odds, but with English resolution and English

devotion they took up their task, and went stubbornly on with it, through

good fortune and bad, and fought the most unpromising fight that one may

read of in fiction or out of it, and won it thoroughly.

The Mutiny broke out so suddenly, and spread with such rapidity that

there was but little time for occupants of weak outlying stations to

escape to places of safety. Attempts were made, of course, but they were

attended by hardships as bitter as death in the few cases which were

successful; for the heat ranged between 120 and 138 in the shade; the way

led through hostile peoples, and food and water were hardly to be had.

For ladies and children accustomed to ease and comfort and plenty, such a

journey must have been a cruel experience. Sir G. O. Trevelyan quotes

an example:

“This is what befell Mrs. M——, the wife of the surgeon at a

certain station on the southern confines of the insurrection. 'I

heard,' she says, 'a number of shots fired, and, looking out, I saw

my husband driving furiously from the mess-house, waving his whip.

I ran to him, and, seeing a bearer with my child in his arms, I

caught her up, and got into the buggy. At the mess-house we found

all the officers assembled, together with sixty sepoys, who had

remained faithful. We went off in one large party, amidst a general

conflagration of our late homes. We reached the caravanserai at

Chattapore the next morning, and thence started for Callinger. At

this point our sepoy escort deserted us. We were fired upon by

match-lockmen, and one officer was shot dead. We heard, likewise,

that the people had risen at Callinger, so we returned and walked

back ten miles that day. M—— and I carried the child alternately.

Presently Mrs. Smalley died of sunstroke. We had no food amongst

us. An officer kindly lent us a horse. We were very faint. The

Major died, and was buried; also the Sergeant-major and some women.

The bandsmen left us on the nineteenth of June. We were fired at

again by match-lockmen, and changed direction for Allahabad. Our

party consisted of nine gentlemen, two children, the sergeant and

his wife. On the morning of the twentieth, Captain Scott took

Lottie on to his horse. I was riding behind my husband, and she was

so crushed between us. She was two years old on the first of the

month. We were both weak through want of food and the effect of the

sun. Lottie and I had no head covering. M—— had a sepoy's cap I

found on the ground. Soon after sunrise we were followed by

villagers armed with clubs and spears. One of them struck Captain

Scott's horse on the leg. He galloped off with Lottie, and my poor

husband never saw his child again. We rode on several miles,

keeping away from villages, and then crossed the river. Our thirst

was extreme. M—— had dreadful cramps, so that I had to hold him

on the horse. I was very uneasy about him. The day before I saw

the drummer's wife eating chupatties, and asked her to give a piece

to the child, which she did. I now saw water in a ravine. The

descent was steep, and our only drinking-vessel was M——'s cap.

Our horse got water, and I bathed my neck. I had no stockings, and

my feet were torn and blistered. Two peasants came in sight, and we

were frightened and rode off. The sergeant held our horse, and

M—— put me up and mounted. I think he must have got suddenly

faint for I fell and he over me, on the road, when the horse started off.

Some time before he said, and Barber, too, that he could not live

many hours. I felt he was dying before we came to the ravine. He

told me his wishes about his children and myself, and took leave.

My brain seemed burnt up. No tears came. As soon as we fell, the

sergeant let go the horse, and it went off; so that escape was cut

off. We sat down on the ground waiting for death. Poor fellow! he

was very weak; his thirst was frightful, and I went to get him

water. Some villagers came, and took my rupees and watch. I took

off my wedding-ring, and twisted it in my hair, and replaced the

guard. I tore off the skirt of my dress to bring water in, but was

no use, for when I returned my beloved's eyes were fixed, and,

though I called and tried to restore him, and poured water into his

mouth, it only rattled in his throat. He never spoke to me again.

I held him in my arms till he sank gradually down. I felt frantic,

but could not cry. I was alone. I bound his head and face in my

dress, for there was no earth to bury him. The pain in my hands and

feet was dreadful. I went down to the ravine, and sat in the water

on a stone, hoping to get off at night and look for Lottie. When I

came back from the water, I saw that they had not taken her little

watch, chain, and seals, so I tied them under my petticoat. In an

hour, about thirty villagers came, they dragged me out of the

ravine, and took off my jacket, and found the little chain. They

then dragged me to a village, mocking me all the way, and disputing

as to whom I was to belong to. The whole population came to look at

me. I asked for a bedstead, and lay down outside the door of a hut.

They had a dozen of cows, and yet refused me milk. When night came,

and the village was quiet, some old woman brought me a leafful of

rice. I was too parched to eat, and they gave me water. The

morning after a neighboring Rajah sent a palanquin and a horseman to

fetch me, who told me that a little child and three Sahibs had come

to his master's house. And so the poor mother found her lost one,

'greatly blistered,' poor little creature. It is not for Europeans

in India to pray that their flight be not in the winter.”

In the first days of June the aged general, Sir Hugh Wheeler commanding

the forces at Cawnpore, was deserted by his native troops; then he moved

out of the fort and into an exposed patch of open flat ground and built a

four-foot mud wall around it. He had with him a few hundred white

soldiers and officers, and apparently more women and children than

soldiers. He was short of provisions, short of arms, short of

ammunition, short of military wisdom, short of everything but courage and

devotion to duty. The defense of that open lot through twenty-one days

and nights of hunger, thirst, Indian heat, and a never-ceasing storm of

bullets, bombs, and cannon-balls—a defense conducted, not by the aged

and infirm general, but by a young officer named Moore—is one of the

most heroic episodes in history. When at last the Nana found it

impossible to conquer these starving men and women with powder and ball,

he resorted to treachery, and that succeeded. He agreed to supply them

with food and send them to Allahabad in boats. Their mud wall and their

barracks were in ruins, their provisions were at the point of exhaustion,

they had done all that the brave could do, they had conquered an

honorable compromise,—their forces had been fearfully reduced by

casualties and by disease, they were not able to continue the contest

longer. They came forth helpless but suspecting no treachery, the Nana's

host closed around them, and at a signal from a trumpet the massacre

began. About two hundred women and children were spared—for the

present—but all the men except three or four were killed. Among the

incidents of the massacre quoted by Sir G. O. Trevelyan, is this:

“When, after the lapse of some twenty minutes, the dead began to

outnumber the living;—when the fire slackened, as the marks grew

few and far between; then the troopers who had been drawn up to the

right of the temple plunged into the river, sabre between teeth, and

pistol in hand. Thereupon two half-caste Christian women, the wives

of musicians in the band of the Fifty-sixth, witnessed a scene which

should not be related at second-hand. 'In the boat where I was to

have gone,' says Mrs. Bradshaw, confirmed throughout by Mrs. Setts,

'was the school-mistress and twenty-two misses. General Wheeler

came last in a palkee. They carried him into the water near the

boat. I stood close by. He said, 'Carry me a little further

towards the boat.' But a trooper said, 'No, get out here.' As the

General got out of the palkee, head-foremost, the trooper gave him a

cut with his sword into the neck, and he fell into the water. My

son was killed near him. I saw it; alas! alas! Some were stabbed

with bayonets; others cut down. Little infants were torn in pieces.

We saw it; we did; and tell you only what we saw. Other children

were stabbed and thrown into the river. The schoolgirls were burnt

to death. I saw their clothes and hair catch fire. In the water, a

few paces off, by the next boat, we saw the youngest daughter of

Colonel Williams. A sepoy was going to kill her with his bayonet.

She said, 'My father was always kind to sepoys.' He turned away,

and just then a villager struck her on the head with a club, and she

fell into the water. These people likewise saw good Mr. Moncrieff,

the clergyman, take a book from his pocket that he never had leisure

to open, and heard him commence a prayer for mercy which he was not

permitted to conclude. Another deponent observed an European making

for a drain like a scared water-rat, when some boatmen, armed with

cudgels, cut off his retreat, and beat him down dead into the mud.”

The women and children who had been reserved from the massacre were

imprisoned during a fortnight in a small building, one story high—a

cramped place, a slightly modified Black Hole of Calcutta. They were

waiting in suspense; there was none who could forecast their fate.

Meantime the news of the massacre had traveled far and an army of

rescuers with Havelock at its head was on its way—at least an army which

hoped to be rescuers. It was crossing the country by forced marches, and

strewing its way with its own dead—men struck down by cholera, and by a

heat which reached 135 deg. It was in a vengeful fury, and it stopped

for nothing—neither heat, nor fatigue, nor disease, nor human

opposition.

It tore its impetuous way through hostile forces, winning victory after

victory, but still striding on and on, not halting to count results. And

at last, after this extraordinary march, it arrived before the walls of

Cawnpore, met the Nana's massed strength, delivered a crushing defeat,

and entered.

But too late—only a few hours too late. For at the last moment the Nana

had decided upon the massacre of the captive women and children, and had

commissioned three Mohammedans and two Hindoos to do the work. Sir G.

O. Trevelyan says:

“Thereupon the five men entered. It was the short gloaming of

Hindostan—the hour when ladies take their evening drive. She who

had accosted the officer was standing in the doorway. With her were

the native doctor and two Hindoo menials. That much of the business

might be seen from the veranda, but all else was concealed amidst

the interior gloom. Shrieks and scuffling acquainted those without

that the journeymen were earning their hire. Survur Khan soon

emerged with his sword broken off at the hilt. He procured another

from the Nana's house, and a few minutes after appeared again on the

same errand. The third blade was of better temper; or perhaps the

thick of the work was already over. By the time darkness had closed

in, the men came forth and locked up the house for the night. Then

the screams ceased, but the groans lasted till morning.

“The sun rose as usual. When he had been up nearly three hours the

five repaired to the scene of their labors over night. They were

attended by a few sweepers, who proceeded to transfer the contents

of the house to a dry well situated behind some trees which grew

hard by. 'The bodies,' says one who was present throughout, 'were

dragged out, most of them by the hair of the head. Those who had

clothing worth taking were stripped. Some of the women were alive.

I cannot say how many; but three could speak. They prayed for the

sake of God that an end might be put to their sufferings. I

remarked one very stout woman, a half-caste, who was severely

wounded in both arms, who entreated to be killed. She and two or

three others were placed against the bank of the cut by which

bullocks go down in drawing water. The dead were first thrown in.

Yes: there was a great crowd looking on; they were standing along

the walls of the compound. They were principally city people and

villagers. Yes: there were also sepoys. Three boys were alive.

They were fair children. The eldest, I think, must have been six or

seven, and the youngest five years. They were running around the

well (where else could they go to?), and there was none to save

them. No: none said a word or tried to save them.'

“At length the smallest of them made an infantile attempt to get

away. The little thing had been frightened past bearing by the

murder of one of the surviving ladies. He thus attracted the

observation of a native who flung him and his companions down the

well.”

The soldiers had made a march of eighteen days, almost without rest, to

save the women and the children, and now they were too late—all were

dead and the assassin had flown. What happened then, Trevelyan hesitated

to put into words. “Of what took place, the less said is the better.”

Then he continues:

“But there was a spectacle to witness which might excuse much.

Those who, straight from the contested field, wandered sobbing

through the rooms of the ladies' house, saw what it were well could

the outraged earth have straightway hidden. The inner apartment was

ankle-deep in blood. The plaster was scored with sword-cuts; not

high up as where men have fought, but low down, and about the

corners, as if a creature had crouched to avoid the blow. Strips of

dresses, vainly tied around the handles of the doors, signified the

contrivance to which feminine despair had resorted as a means of

keeping out the murderers. Broken combs were there, and the frills

of children's trousers, and torn cuffs and pinafores, and little

round hats, and one or two shoes with burst latchets, and one or two

daguerreotype cases with cracked glasses. An officer picked up a

few curls, preserved in a bit of cardboard, and marked 'Ned's hair,

with love'; but around were strewn locks, some near a yard in

length, dissevered, not as a keepsake, by quite other scissors.”

The battle of Waterloo was fought on the 18th of June, 1815. I do not

state this fact as a reminder to the reader, but as news to him. For a

forgotten fact is news when it comes again. Writers of books have the

fashion of whizzing by vast and renowned historical events with the

remark, “The details of this tremendous episode are too familiar to the

reader to need repeating here.” They know that that is not true. It is

a low kind of flattery. They know that the reader has forgotten every

detail of it, and that nothing of the tremendous event is left in his

mind but a vague and formless luminous smudge. Aside from the desire to

flatter the reader, they have another reason for making the remark-two

reasons, indeed. They do not remember the details themselves, and do not

want the trouble of hunting them up and copying them out; also, they are

afraid that if they search them out and print them they will be scoffed

at by the book-reviewers for retelling those worn old things which are

familiar to everybody. They should not mind the reviewer's jeer; he

doesn't remember any of the worn old things until the book which he is

reviewing has retold them to him.

I have made the quoted remark myself, at one time and another, but I was

not doing it to flatter the reader; I was merely doing it to save work.

If I had known the details without brushing up, I would have put them in;

but I didn't, and I did not want the labor of posting myself; so I said,

“The details of this tremendous episode are too familiar to the reader to

need repeating here.” I do not like that kind of a lie; still, it does

save work.

I am not trying to get out of repeating the details of the Siege of

Lucknow in fear of the reviewer; I am not leaving them out in fear that

they would not interest the reader; I am leaving them out partly to save

work; mainly for lack of room. It is a pity, too; for there is not a

dull place anywhere in the great story.

Ten days before the outbreak (May 10th) of the Mutiny, all was serene at

Lucknow, the huge capital of Oudh, the kingdom which had recently been

seized by the India Company. There was a great garrison, composed of

about 7,000 native troops and between 700 and 800 whites. These white

soldiers and their families were probably the only people of their race

there; at their elbow was that swarming population of warlike natives, a

race of born soldiers, brave, daring, and fond of fighting. On high

ground just outside the city stood the palace of that great personage,

the Resident, the representative of British power and authority. It

stood in the midst of spacious grounds, with its due complement of

outbuildings, and the grounds were enclosed by a wall—a wall not for

defense, but for privacy. The mutinous spirit was in the air, but the

whites were not afraid, and did not feel much troubled.

Then came the outbreak at Meerut, then the capture of Delhi by the

mutineers; in June came the three-weeks leaguer of Sir Hugh Wheeler in

his open lot at Cawnpore—40 miles distant from Lucknow—then the

treacherous massacre of that gallant little garrison; and now the great

revolt was in full flower, and the comfortable condition of things at

Lucknow was instantly changed.

There was an outbreak there, and Sir Henry Lawrence marched out of the

Residency on the 30th of June to put it down, but was defeated with heavy

loss, and had difficulty in getting back again. That night the memorable

siege of the Residency—called the siege of Lucknow—began. Sir Henry

was killed three days later, and Brigadier Inglis succeeded him in

command.

Outside of the Residency fence was an immense host of hostile and

confident native besiegers; inside it were 480 loyal native soldiers, 730

white ones, and 500 women and children.

In those days the English garrisons always managed to hamper themselves

sufficiently with women and children.

The natives established themselves in houses close at hand and began to

rain bullets and cannon-balls into the Residency; and this they kept up,

night and day, during four months and a half, the little garrison

industriously replying all the time. The women and children soon became

so used to the roar of the guns that it ceased to disturb their sleep.

The children imitated siege and defense in their play. The women—with

any pretext, or with none—would sally out into the storm-swept grounds.

The defense was kept up week after week, with stubborn fortitude, in the

midst of death, which came in many forms—by bullet, small-pox, cholera,

and by various diseases induced by unpalatable and insufficient food, by

the long hours of wearying and exhausting overwork in the daily and

nightly battle in the oppressive Indian heat, and by the broken rest

caused by the intolerable pest of mosquitoes, flies, mice, rats, and

fleas.

Six weeks after the beginning of the siege more than one-half of the

original force of white soldiers was dead, and close upon three-fifths of

the original native force.

But the fighting went on just the same. The enemy mined, the English

counter-mined, and, turn about, they blew up each other's posts. The

Residency grounds were honey-combed with the enemy's tunnels. Deadly

courtesies were constantly exchanged—sorties by the English in the

night; rushes by the enemy in the night—rushes whose purpose was to

breach the walls or scale them; rushes which cost heavily, and always

failed.

The ladies got used to all the horrors of war—the shrieks of mutilated

men, the sight of blood and death. Lady Inglis makes this mention in her

diary:

“Mrs. Bruere's nurse was carried past our door to-day, wounded in

the eye. To extract the bullet it was found necessary to take out

the eye—a fearful operation. Her mistress held her while it was

performed.”

The first relieving force failed to relieve. It was under Havelock and

Outram; and arrived when the siege had been going on for three months.

It fought its desperate way to Lucknow, then fought its way through the

city against odds of a hundred to one, and entered the Residency; but

there was not enough left of it, then, to do any good. It lost more men

in its last fight than it found in the Residency when it got in. It

became captive itself.

The fighting and starving and dying by bullets and disease went steadily

on. Both sides fought with energy and industry. Captain Birch puts this

striking incident in evidence. He is speaking of the third month of the

siege:

“As an instance of the heavy firing brought to bear on our position

this month may be mentioned the cutting down of the upper story of a

brick building simply by musketry firing. This building was in a

most exposed position. All the shots which just missed the top of

the rampart cut into the dead wall pretty much in a straight line,

and at length cut right through and brought the upper story tumbling

down. The upper structure on the top of the brigade-mess also fell

in. The Residency house was a wreck. Captain Anderson's post had

long ago been knocked down, and Innes' post also fell in. These two

were riddled with round shot. As many as 200 were picked up by

Colonel Masters.”

The exhausted garrison fought doggedly on all through the next month—

October. Then, November 2d, news came Sir Colin Campbell's relieving

force would soon be on its way from Cawnpore.

On the 12th the boom of his guns was heard.

On the 13th the sounds came nearer—he was slowly, but steadily, cutting

his way through, storming one stronghold after another.

On the 14th he captured the Martiniere College, and ran up the British

flag there. It was seen from the Residency.

Next he took the Dilkoosha.

On the 17th he took the former mess-house of the 32d regiment—a

fortified building, and very strong. “A most exciting, anxious day,”

writes Lady Inglis in her diary. “About 4 P.M., two strange officers

walked through our yard, leading their horses”—and by that sign she knew

that communication was established between the forces, that the relief

was real, this time, and that the long siege of Lucknow was ended.

The last eight or ten miles of Sir Colin Campbell's march was through

seas of blood. The weapon mainly used was the bayonet, the fighting was

desperate. The way was mile-stoned with detached strong buildings of

stone, fortified, and heavily garrisoned, and these had to be taken by

assault. Neither side asked for quarter, and neither gave it. At the

Secundrabagh, where nearly two thousand of the enemy occupied a great

stone house in a garden, the work of slaughter was continued until every

man was killed. That is a sample of the character of that devastating

march.

There were but few trees in the plain at that time, and from the

Residency the progress of the march, step by step, victory by victory,

could be noted; the ascending clouds of battle-smoke marked the way to

the eye, and the thunder of the guns marked it to the ear.

Sir Colin Campbell had not come to Lucknow to hold it, but to save the

occupants of the Residency, and bring them away. Four or five days after

his arrival the secret evacuation by the troops took place, in the middle

of a dark night, by the principal gate, (the Bailie Guard). The two

hundred women and two hundred and fifty children had been previously

removed. Captain Birch says:

“And now commenced a movement of the most perfect arrangement and

successful generalship—the withdrawal of the whole of the various

forces, a combined movement requiring the greatest care and skill.

First, the garrison in immediate contact with the enemy at the

furthest extremity of the Residency position was marched out. Every

other garrison in turn fell in behind it, and so passed out through

the Bailie Guard gate, till the whole of our position was evacuated.

Then Havelock's force was similarly withdrawn, post by post,

marching in rear of our garrison. After them in turn came the

forces of the Commander-in-Chief, which joined on in the rear of

Havelock's force. Regiment by regiment was withdrawn with the

utmost order and regularity. The whole operation resembled the

movement of a telescope. Stern silence was kept, and the enemy took

no alarm.”

Lady Inglis, referring to her husband and to General Sir James Outram,

sets down the closing detail of this impressive midnight retreat, in

darkness and by stealth, of this shadowy host through the gate which it

had defended so long and so well:

“At twelve precisely they marched out, John and Sir James Outram

remaining till all had passed, and then they took off their hats to

the Bailie Guard, the scene of as noble a defense as I think history

will ever have to relate.”

CHAPTER LIX.

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist

but you have ceased to live.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict

truth.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

We were driven over Sir Colin Campbell's route by a British officer, and

when I arrived at the Residency I was so familiar with the road that I

could have led a retreat over it myself; but the compass in my head has

been out of order from my birth, and so, as soon as I was within the

battered Bailie Guard and turned about to review the march and imagine

the relieving forces storming their way along it, everything was upside

down and wrong end first in a moment, and I was never able to get

straightened out again. And now, when I look at the battle-plan, the

confusion remains. In me the east was born west, the battle-plans which

have the east on the right-hand side are of no use to me.

The Residency ruins are draped with flowering vines, and are impressive

and beautiful. They and the grounds are sacred now, and will suffer no

neglect nor be profaned by any sordid or commercial use while the British

remain masters of India. Within the grounds are buried the dead who gave

up their lives there in the long siege.

After a fashion, I was able to imagine the fiery storm that raged night

and day over the place during so many months, and after a fashion I could

imagine the men moving through it, but I could not satisfactorily place

the 200 women, and I could do nothing at all with the 250 children. I

knew by Lady Inglis' diary that the children carried on their small

affairs very much as if blood and carnage and the crash and thunder of a

siege were natural and proper features of nursery life, and I tried to

realize it; but when her little Johnny came rushing, all excitement,

through the din and smoke, shouting, “Oh, mamma, the white hen has laid

an egg!” I saw that I could not do it. Johnny's place was under the

bed. I could imagine him there, because I could imagine myself there;

and I think I should not have been interested in a hen that was laying an

egg; my interest would have been with the parties that were laying the

bombshells. I sat at dinner with one of those children in the Club's

Indian palace, and I knew that all through the siege he was perfecting

his teething and learning to talk; and while to me he was the most

impressive object in Lucknow after the Residency ruins, I was not able to

imagine what his life had been during that tempestuous infancy of his,

nor what sort of a curious surprise it must have been to him to be

marched suddenly out into a strange dumb world where there wasn't any

noise, and nothing going on. He was only forty-one when I saw him, a

strangely youthful link to connect the present with so ancient an episode

as the Great Mutiny.

By and by we saw Cawnpore, and the open lot which was the scene of

Moore's memorable defense, and the spot on the shore of the Ganges where

the massacre of the betrayed garrison occurred, and the small Indian

temple whence the bugle-signal notified the assassins to fall on. This

latter was a lonely spot, and silent. The sluggish river drifted by,

almost currentless. It was dead low water, narrow channels with vast

sandbars between, all the way across the wide bed; and the only living

thing in sight was that grotesque and solemn bald-headed bird, the

Adjutant, standing on his six-foot stilts, solitary on a distant bar,

with his head sunk between his shoulders, thinking; thinking of his

prize, I suppose—the dead Hindoo that lay awash at his feet, and whether

to eat him alone or invite friends. He and his prey were a proper accent

to that mournful place. They were in keeping with it, they emphasized

its loneliness and its solemnity.

And we saw the scene of the slaughter of the helpless women and children,

and also the costly memorial that is built over the well which contains

their remains. The Black Hole of Calcutta is gone, but a more reverent

age is come, and whatever remembrancer still exists of the moving and

heroic sufferings and achievements of the garrisons of Lucknow and

Cawnpore will be guarded and preserved.

In Agra and its neighborhood, and afterwards at Delhi, we saw forts,

mosques, and tombs, which were built in the great days of the Mohammedan

emperors, and which are marvels of cost, magnitude, and richness of

materials and ornamentation, creations of surpassing grandeur, wonders

which do indeed make the like things in the rest of the world seem tame

and inconsequential by comparison. I am not purposing to describe them.

By good fortune I had not read too much about them, and therefore was

able to get a natural and rational focus upon them, with the result that

they thrilled, blessed, and exalted me. But if I had previously

overheated my imagination by drinking too much pestilential literary hot

Scotch, I should have suffered disappointment and sorrow.

I mean to speak of only one of these many world-renowned buildings, the

Taj Mahal, the most celebrated construction in the earth. I had read a

great deal too much about it. I saw it in the daytime, I saw it in the

moonlight, I saw it near at hand, I saw it from a distance; and I knew

all the time, that of its kind it was the wonder of THE world, with no

competitor now and no possible future competitor; and yet, it was not MY

Taj. My Taj had been built by excitable literary people; it was solidly

lodged in my head, and I could not blast it out.

I wish to place before the reader some of the usual descriptions of the

Taj, and ask him to take note of the impressions left in his mind. These

descriptions do really state the truth—as nearly as the limitations of

language will allow. But language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure

vehicle, and it can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way that

they will not inflate the facts—by help of the reader's imagination,

which is always ready to take a hand, and work for nothing, and do the

bulk of it at that.

I will begin with a few sentences from the excellent little local

guide-book of Mr. Satya Chandra Mukerji. I take them from here and there

in his description:

“The inlaid work of the Taj and the flowers and petals that are to

be found on all sides on the surface of the marble evince a most

delicate touch.”

That is true.

“The inlaid work, the marble, the flowers, the buds, the leaves, the

petals, and the lotus stems are almost without a rival in the whole

of the civilized world.”

“The work of inlaying with stones and gems is found in the highest

perfection in the Taj.”

Gems, inlaid flowers, buds, and leaves to be found on all sides. What do

you see before you? Is the fairy structure growing? Is it becoming a

jewel casket?

“The whole of the Taj produces a wonderful effect that is equally

sublime and beautiful.”

Then Sir William Wilson Hunter:

“The Taj Mahal with its beautiful domes, 'a dream of marble,' rises

on the river bank.”

“The materials are white marble and red sandstone.”

“The complexity of its design and the delicate intricacy of the

workmanship baffle description.”

Sir William continues. I will italicize some of his words:

“The mausoleum stands on a raised marble platform at each of whose

corners rises a tall and slender minaret of graceful proportions and

of exquisite beauty. Beyond the platform stretch the two wings, one

of which is itself a mosque of great architectural merit. In the

center of the whole design the mausoleum occupies a square of 186

feet, with the angles deeply truncated so as to form an unequal

octagon. The main feature in this central pile is the great dome,

which swells upward to nearly two-thirds of a sphere and tapers at

its extremity into a pointed spire crowned by a crescent. Beneath

it an enclosure of marble trellis-work surrounds the tomb of the

princess and of her husband, the Emperor. Each corner of the

mausoleum is covered by a similar though much smaller dome erected

on a pediment pierced with graceful Saracenic arches. Light is

admitted into the interior through a double screen of pierced

marble, which tempers the glare of an Indian sky while its whiteness

prevents the mellow effect from degenerating into gloom. The

internal decorations consist of inlaid work in precious stones, such

as agate, jasper, etc., with which every squandril or salient point

in the architecture is richly fretted. Brown and violet marble is

also freely employed in wreaths, scrolls, and lintels to relieve the

monotony of white wall. In regard to color and design, the interior

of the Taj may rank first in the world for purely decorative

workmanship; while the perfect symmetry of its exterior, once seen

can never be forgotten, nor the aerial grace of its domes, rising

like marble bubbles into the clear sky. The Taj represents the most

highly elaborated stage of ornamentation reached by the

Indo-Mohammedan builders, the stage in which the architect ends and

the jeweler begins. In its magnificent gateway the diagonal

ornamentation at the corners, which satisfied the designers of the

gateways of Itimad-ud-doulah and Sikandra mausoleums is superseded

by fine marble cables, in bold twists, strong and handsome. The

triangular insertions of white marble and large flowers have in like

manner given place to fine inlaid work. Firm perpendicular lines in

black marble with well proportioned panels of the same material are

effectively used in the interior of the gateway. On its top the

Hindu brackets and monolithic architraves of Sikandra are replaced

by Moorish carped arches, usually single blocks of red sandstone, in

the Kiosks and pavilions which adorn the roof. From the pillared

pavilions a magnificent view is obtained of the Taj gardens below,

with the noble Jumna river at their farther end, and the city and

fort of Agra in the distance. From this beautiful and splendid

gateway one passes up a straight alley shaded by evergreen trees

cooled by a broad shallow piece of water running along the middle of

the path to the Taj itself. The Taj is entirely of marble and gems.

The red sandstone of the other Mohammedan buildings has entirely

disappeared, or rather the red sandstone which used to form the

thickness of the walls, is in the Taj itself overlaid completely

with white marble, and the white marble is itself inlaid with

precious stones arranged in lovely patterns of flowers. A feeling

of purity impresses itself on the eye and the mind from the absence

of the coarser material which forms so invariable a material in Agra

architecture. The lower wall and panels are covered with tulips,

oleanders, and fullblown lilies, in flat carving on the white

marble; and although the inlaid work of flowers done in gems is very

brilliant when looked at closely, there is on the whole but little

color, and the all-prevailing sentiment is one of whiteness,

silence, and calm. The whiteness is broken only by the fine color

of the inlaid gems, by lines in black marble, and by delicately

written inscriptions, also in black, from the Koran. Under the dome

of the vast mausoleum a high and beautiful screen of open tracery in

white marble rises around the two tombs, or rather cenotaphs of the

emperor and his princess; and in this marvel of marble the carving

has advanced from the old geometrical patterns to a trellis-work of

flowers and foliage, handled with great freedom and spirit. The two

cenotaphs in the center of the exquisite enclosure have no carving

except the plain Kalamdan or oblong pen-box on the tomb of Emperor

Shah Jehan. But both cenotaphs are inlaid with flowers made of

costly gems, and with the ever graceful oleander scroll.”

Bayard Taylor, after describing the details of the Taj, goes on to say:

“On both sides the palm, the banyan, and the feathery bamboo mingle

their foliage; the song of birds meets your ears, and the odor of

roses and lemon flowers sweetens the air. Down such a vista and

over such a foreground rises the Taj. There is no mystery, no sense

of partial failure about the Taj. A thing of perfect beauty and of

absolute finish in every detail, it might pass for the work of genii

who knew naught of the weaknesses and ills with which mankind are

beset.”

All of these details are true. But, taken together, they state a

falsehood—to you. You cannot add them up correctly. Those writers know

the values of their words and phrases, but to you the words and phrases

convey other and uncertain values. To those writers their phrases have

values which I think I am now acquainted with; and for the help of the

reader I will here repeat certain of those words and phrases, and follow

them with numerals which shall represent those values—then we shall see

the difference between a writer's ciphering and a mistaken reader's—

Precious stones, such as agate, jasper, etc.—5.

With which every salient point is richly fretted—5.

First in the world for purely decorative workmanship—9.

The Taj represents the stage where the architect ends and the jeweler

begins—5.

The Taj is entirely of marble and gems—7.

Inlaid with precious stones in lovely patterns of flowers—5.

The inlaid work of flowers done in gems is very brilliant

(followed by a most important modification which the reader is sure to

read too carelessly)—2.

The vast mausoleum—5.

This marvel of marble—5.

The exquisite enclosure—5.

Inlaid with flowers made of costly gems—5.

A thing of perfect beauty and absolute finish—5.

Those details are correct; the figures which I have placed after them

represent quite fairly their individual, values. Then why, as a whole,

do they convey a false impression to the reader? It is because the

reader—beguiled by his heated imagination—masses them in the wrong

way. The writer would mass the first three figures in the following way,

and they would speak the truth.

5

5

9

Total—19

But the reader masses them thus—and then they tell a lie—559.

The writer would add all of his twelve numerals together, and then the

sum would express the whole truth about the Taj, and the truth only—63.

But the reader—always helped by his imagination—would put the figures

in a row one after the other, and get this sum, which would tell him a

noble big lie:

559575255555.

You must put in the commas yourself; I have to go on with my work.

The reader will always be sure to put the figures together in that wrong

way, and then as surely before him will stand, sparkling in the sun, a

gem-crusted Taj tall as the Matterhorn.

I had to visit Niagara fifteen times before I succeeded in getting my

imaginary Falls gauged to the actuality and could begin to sanely and

wholesomely wonder at them for what they were, not what I had expected

them to be. When I first approached them it was with my face lifted

toward the sky, for I thought I was going to see an Atlantic ocean

pouring down thence over cloud-vexed Himalayan heights, a sea-green wall

of water sixty miles front and six miles high, and so, when the toy

reality came suddenly into view—that beruffled little wet apron hanging

out to dry—the shock was too much for me, and I fell with a dull thud.

Yet slowly, surely, steadily, in the course of my fifteen visits, the

proportions adjusted themselves to the facts, and I came at last to

realize that a waterfall a hundred and sixty-five feet high and a quarter

of a mile wide was an impressive thing. It was not a dipperful to my

vanished great vision, but it would answer.

I know that I ought to do with the Taj as I was obliged to do with

Niagara—see it fifteen times, and let my mind gradually get rid of the

Taj built in it by its describers, by help of my imagination, and

substitute for it the Taj of fact. It would be noble and fine, then, and

a marvel; not the marvel which it replaced, but still a marvel, and fine

enough. I am a careless reader, I suppose—an impressionist reader; an

impressionist reader of what is not an impressionist picture; a reader

who overlooks the informing details or masses their sum improperly, and

gets only a large splashy, general effect—an effect which is not

correct, and which is not warranted by the particulars placed before me—

particulars which I did not examine, and whose meanings I did not

cautiously and carefully estimate. It is an effect which is some

thirty-five or forty times finer than the reality, and is therefore a

great deal better and more valuable than the reality; and so, I ought

never to hunt up the reality, but stay miles away from it, and thus

preserve undamaged my own private mighty Niagara tumbling out of the

vault of heaven, and my own ineffable Taj, built of tinted mists upon

jeweled arches of rainbows supported by colonnades of moonlight. It is a

mistake for a person with an unregulated imagination to go and look at an

illustrious world's wonder.

I suppose that many, many years ago I gathered the idea that the Taj's

place in the achievements of man was exactly the place of the ice-storm

in the achievements of Nature; that the Taj represented man's supremest

possibility in the creation of grace and beauty and exquisiteness and

splendor, just as the ice-storm represents Nature's supremest possibility

in the combination of those same qualities. I do not know how long ago

that idea was bred in me, but I know that I cannot remember back to a

time when the thought of either of these symbols of gracious and

unapproachable perfection did not at once suggest the other. If I

thought of the ice-storm, the Taj rose before me divinely beautiful; if I

thought of the Taj, with its encrustings and inlayings of jewels, the

vision of the ice-storm rose. And so, to me, all these years, the Taj

has had no rival among the temples and palaces of men, none that even

remotely approached it—it was man's architectural ice-storm.

Here in London the other night I was talking with some Scotch and English

friends, and I mentioned the ice-storm, using it as a figure—a figure

which failed, for none of them had heard of the ice-storm. One

gentleman, who was very familiar with American literature, said he had

never seen it mentioned in any book. That is strange. And I, myself,

was not able to say that I had seen it mentioned in a book; and yet the

autumn foliage, with all other American scenery, has received full and

competent attention.

The oversight is strange, for in America the ice-storm is an event. And

it is not an event which one is careless about. When it comes, the news

flies from room to room in the house, there are bangings on the doors,

and shoutings, “The ice-storm! the ice-storm!” and even the laziest

sleepers throw off the covers and join the rush for the windows. The

ice-storm occurs in midwinter, and usually its enchantments are wrought

in the silence and the darkness of the night. A fine drizzling rain

falls hour after hour upon the naked twigs and branches of the trees, and

as it falls it freezes. In time the trunk and every branch and twig are

incased in hard pure ice; so that the tree looks like a skeleton tree

made all of glass—glass that is crystal-clear. All along the underside

of every branch and twig is a comb of little icicles—the frozen drip.

Sometimes these pendants do not quite amount to icicles, but are round

beads—frozen tears.

The weather clears, toward dawn, and leaves a brisk pure atmosphere and a

sky without a shred of cloud in it—and everything is still, there is not

a breath of wind. The dawn breaks and spreads, the news of the storm

goes about the house, and the little and the big, in wraps and blankets,

flock to the window and press together there, and gaze intently out upon

the great white ghost in the grounds, and nobody says a word, nobody

stirs. All are waiting; they know what is coming, and they are waiting

waiting for the miracle. The minutes drift on and on and on, with not a

sound but the ticking of the clock; at last the sun fires a sudden sheaf

of rays into the ghostly tree and turns it into a white splendor of

glittering diamonds. Everybody catches his breath, and feels a swelling

in his throat and a moisture in his eyes-but waits again; for he knows

what is coming; there is more yet. The sun climbs higher, and still

higher, flooding the tree from its loftiest spread of branches to its

lowest, turning it to a glory of white fire; then in a moment, without

warning, comes the great miracle, the supreme miracle, the miracle

without its fellow in the earth; a gust of wind sets every branch and

twig to swaying, and in an instant turns the whole white tree into a

spouting and spraying explosion of flashing gems of every conceivable

color; and there it stands and sways this way and that, flash! flash!

flash! a dancing and glancing world of rubies, emeralds, diamonds,

sapphires, the most radiant spectacle, the most blinding spectacle, the

divinest, the most exquisite, the most intoxicating vision of fire and

color and intolerable and unimaginable splendor that ever any eye has

rested upon in this world, or will ever rest upon outside of the gates of

heaven.

By all my senses, all my faculties, I know that the icestorm is Nature's

supremest achievement in the domain of the superb and the beautiful; and

by my reason, at least, I know that the Taj is man's ice-storm.

In the ice-storm every one of the myriad ice-beads pendant from twig and

branch is an individual gem, and changes color with every motion caused

by the wind; each tree carries a million, and a forest-front exhibits the

splendors of the single tree multiplied by a thousand.

It occurs to me now that I have never seen the ice-storm put upon canvas,

and have not heard that any painter has tried to do it. I wonder why

that is. Is it that paint cannot counterfeit the intense blaze of a

sun-flooded jewel? There should be, and must be, a reason, and a good

one,

why the most enchanting sight that Nature has created has been neglected

by the brush.

Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict

truth. The describers of the Taj have used the word gem in its strictest

sense—its scientific sense. In that sense it is a mild word, and

promises but little to the eye—nothing bright, nothing brilliant,

nothing sparkling, nothing splendid in the way of color. It accurately

describes the sober and unobtrusive gem-work of the Taj; that is, to the

very highly-educated one person in a thousand; but it most falsely

describes it to the 999. But the 999 are the people who ought to be

especially taken care of, and to them it does not mean quiet-colored

designs wrought in carnelians, or agates, or such things; they know the

word in its wide and ordinary sense only, and so to them it means

diamonds and rubies and opals and their kindred, and the moment their

eyes fall upon it in print they see a vision of glorious colors clothed

in fire.

These describers are writing for the “general,” and so, in order to make

sure of being understood, they ought to use words in their ordinary

sense, or else explain. The word fountain means one thing in Syria,

where there is but a handful of people; it means quite another thing in

North America, where there are 75,000,000. If I were describing some

Syrian scenery, and should exclaim, “Within the narrow space of a quarter

of a mile square I saw, in the glory of the flooding moonlight, two

hundred noble fountains—imagine the spectacle!” the North American would

have a vision of clustering columns of water soaring aloft, bending over

in graceful arches, bursting in beaded spray and raining white fire in

the moonlight-and he would be deceived. But the Syrian would not be

deceived; he would merely see two hundred fresh-water springs—two

hundred drowsing puddles, as level and unpretentious and unexcited as so

many door-mats, and even with the help of the moonlight he would not lose

his grip in the presence of the exhibition. My word “fountain” would be

correct; it would speak the strict truth; and it would convey the strict

truth to the handful of Syrians, and the strictest misinformation to the

North American millions. With their gems—and gems—and more gems—and

gems again—and still other gems—the describers of the Taj are within

their legal but not their moral rights; they are dealing in the strictest

scientific truth; and in doing it they succeed to admiration in telling

“what ain't so.”

CHAPTER LX.

SATAN (impatiently) to NEW-COMER. The trouble with you Chicago people

is, that you think you are the best people down here; whereas you are

merely the most numerous.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

We wandered contentedly around here and there in India; to Lahore, among

other places, where the Lieutenant-Governor lent me an elephant. This

hospitality stands out in my experiences in a stately isolation. It was

a fine elephant, affable, gentlemanly, educated, and I was not afraid of

it. I even rode it with confidence through the crowded lanes of the

native city, where it scared all the horses out of their senses, and

where children were always just escaping its feet. It took the middle of

the road in a fine independent way, and left it to the world to get out

of the way or take the consequences. I am used to being afraid of

collisions when I ride or drive, but when one is on top of an elephant

that feeling is absent. I could have ridden in comfort through a

regiment of runaway teams. I could easily learn to prefer an elephant to

any other vehicle, partly because of that immunity from collisions, and

partly because of the fine view one has from up there, and partly because

of the dignity one feels in that high place, and partly because one can

look in at the windows and see what is going on privately among the

family. The Lahore horses were used to elephants, but they were

rapturously afraid of them just the same. It seemed curious. Perhaps

the better they know the elephant the more they respect him in that

peculiar way. In our own case—we are not afraid of dynamite till we get

acquainted with it.

We drifted as far as Rawal Pindi, away up on the Afghan frontier—I think

it was the Afghan frontier, but it may have been Hertzegovina—it was

around there somewhere—and down again to Delhi, to see the ancient

architectural wonders there and in Old Delhi and not describe them, and

also to see the scene of the illustrious assault, in the Mutiny days,

when the British carried Delhi by storm, one of the marvels of history

for impudent daring and immortal valor.

We had a refreshing rest, there in Delhi, in a great old mansion which

possessed historical interest. It was built by a rich Englishman who had

become orientalized—so much so that he had a zenana. But he was a

broadminded man, and remained so. To please his harem he built a mosque;

to please himself he built an English church. That kind of a man will

arrive, somewhere. In the Mutiny days the mansion was the British

general's headquarters. It stands in a great garden—oriental fashion

—and about it are many noble trees. The trees harbor monkeys; and they

are monkeys of a watchful and enterprising sort, and not much troubled

with fear. They invade the house whenever they get a chance, and carry

off everything they don't want. One morning the master of the house was

in his bath, and the window was open. Near it stood a pot of yellow

paint and a brush. Some monkeys appeared in the window; to scare them

away, the gentleman threw his sponge at them. They did not scare at all;

they jumped into the room and threw yellow paint all over him from the

brush, and drove him out; then they painted the walls and the floor and

the tank and the windows and the furniture yellow, and were in the

dressing-room painting that when help arrived and routed them.

Two of these creatures came into my room in the early morning, through a

window whose shutters I had left open, and when I woke one of them was

before the glass brushing his hair, and the other one had my note-book,

and was reading a page of humorous notes and crying. I did not mind the

one with the hair-brush, but the conduct of the other one hurt me; it

hurts me yet. I threw something at him, and that was wrong, for my host

had told me that the monkeys were best left alone. They threw everything

at me that they could lift, and then went into the bathroom to get some

more things, and I shut the door on them.

At Jeypore, in Rajputana, we made a considerable stay. We were not in

the native city, but several miles from it, in the small European

official suburb. There were but few Europeans—only fourteen but they

were all kind and hospitable, and it amounted to being at home. In

Jeypore we found again what we had found all about India—that while the

Indian servant is in his way a very real treasure, he will sometimes bear

watching, and the Englishman watches him. If he sends him on an errand,

he wants more than the man's word for it that he did the errand. When

fruit and vegetables were sent to us, a “chit” came with them—a receipt

for us to sign; otherwise the things might not arrive. If a gentleman

sent up his carriage, the chit stated “from” such-and-such an hour “to”

such-and-such an hour—which made it unhandy for the coachman and his two

or three subordinates to put us off with a part of the allotted time and

devote the rest of it to a lark of their own.

We were pleasantly situated in a small two-storied inn, in an empty large

compound which was surrounded by a mud wall as high as a man's head. The

inn was kept by nine Hindoo brothers, its owners. They lived, with their

families, in a one-storied building within the compound, but off to one

side, and there was always a long pile of their little comely brown

children loosely stacked in its veranda, and a detachment of the parents

wedged among them, smoking the hookah or the howdah, or whatever they

call it. By the veranda stood a palm, and a monkey lived in it, and led

a lonesome life, and always looked sad and weary, and the crows bothered

him a good deal.

The inn cow poked about the compound and emphasized the secluded and

country air of the place, and there was a dog of no particular breed, who

was always present in the compound, and always asleep, always stretched

out baking in the sun and adding to the deep tranquility and

reposefulness of the place, when the crows were away on business.

White-draperied servants were coming and going all the time, but they

seemed only spirits, for their feet were bare and made no sound. Down

the lane a piece lived an elephant in the shade of a noble tree, and

rocked and rocked, and reached about with his trunk, begging of his brown

mistress or fumbling the children playing at his feet. And there were

camels about, but they go on velvet feet, and were proper to the silence

and serenity of the surroundings.

The Satan mentioned at the head of this chapter was not our Satan, but

the other one. Our Satan was lost to us. In these later days he had

passed out of our life—lamented by me, and sincerely. I was missing

him; I am missing him yet, after all these months. He was an astonishing

creature to fly around and do things. He didn't always do them quite

right, but he did them, and did them suddenly. There was no time wasted.

You would say:

“Pack the trunks and bags, Satan.”

“Wair good” (very good).

Then there would be a brief sound of thrashing and slashing and humming

and buzzing, and a spectacle as of a whirlwind spinning gowns and jackets

and coats and boots and things through the air, and then with bow and

touch—

“Awready, master.”

It was wonderful. It made one dizzy. He crumpled dresses a good deal,

and he had no particular plan about the work—at first—except to put

each article into the trunk it didn't belong in. But he soon reformed,

in this matter. Not entirely; for, to the last, he would cram into the

satchel sacred to literature any odds and ends of rubbish that he

couldn't find a handy place for elsewhere. When threatened with death

for this, it did not trouble him; he only looked pleasant, saluted with

soldierly grace, said “Wair good,” and did it again next day.

He was always busy; kept the rooms tidied up, the boots polished, the

clothes brushed, the wash-basin full of clean water, my dress clothes

laid out and ready for the lecture-hall an hour ahead of time; and he

dressed me from head to heel in spite of my determination to do it

myself, according to my lifelong custom.

He was a born boss, and loved to command, and to jaw and dispute with

inferiors and harry them and bullyrag them. He was fine at the railway

station—yes, he was at his finest there. He would shoulder and plunge

and paw his violent way through the packed multitude of natives with

nineteen coolies at his tail, each bearing a trifle of luggage—one a

trunk, another a parasol, another a shawl, another a fan, and so on; one

article to each, and the longer the procession, the better he was suited

—and he was sure to make for some engaged sleeper and begin to hurl the

owner's things out of it, swearing that it was ours and that there had

been a mistake. Arrived at our own sleeper, he would undo the

bedding-bundles and make the beds and put everything to rights and

shipshape in two minutes; then put his head out at a window and have a

restful good time abusing his gang of coolies and disputing their bill

until we arrived and made him pay them and stop his noise.

Speaking of noise, he certainly was the noisest little devil in India

—and that is saying much, very much, indeed. I loved him for his noise,

but the family detested him for it. They could not abide it; they could

not get reconciled to it. It humiliated them. As a rule, when we got

within six hundred yards of one of those big railway stations, a mighty

racket of screaming and shrieking and shouting and storming would break

upon us, and I would be happy to myself, and the family would say, with

shame:

“There—that's Satan. Why do you keep him?”

And, sure enough, there in the whirling midst of fifteen hundred

wondering people we would find that little scrap of a creature

gesticulating like a spider with the colic, his black eyes snapping, his

fez-tassel dancing, his jaws pouring out floods of billingsgate upon his

gang of beseeching and astonished coolies.

I loved him; I couldn't help it; but the family—why, they could hardly

speak of him with patience. To this day I regret his loss, and wish I

had him back; but they—it is different with them. He was a native, and

came from Surat. Twenty degrees of latitude lay between his birthplace

and Manuel's, and fifteen hundred between their ways and characters and

dispositions. I only liked Manuel, but I loved Satan. This latter's

real name was intensely Indian. I could not quite get the hang of it,

but it sounded like Bunder Rao Ram Chunder Clam Chowder. It was too long

for handy use, anyway; so I reduced it.

When he had been with us two or three weeks, he began to make mistakes

which I had difficulty in patching up for him. Approaching Benares one

day, he got out of the train to see if he could get up a misunderstanding

with somebody, for it had been a weary, long journey and he wanted to

freshen up. He found what he was after, but kept up his pow-wow a shade

too long and got left. So there we were in a strange city and no

chambermaid. It was awkward for us, and we told him he must not do so

any more. He saluted and said in his dear, pleasant way, “Wair good.”

Then at Lucknow he got drunk. I said it was a fever, and got the

family's compassion, and solicitude aroused; so they gave him a

teaspoonful of liquid quinine and it set his vitals on fire. He made

several grimaces which gave me a better idea of the Lisbon earthquake

than any I have ever got of it from paintings and descriptions. His

drunk was still portentously solid next morning, but I could have pulled

him through with the family if he would only have taken another spoonful

of that remedy; but no, although he was stupefied, his memory still had

flickerings of life; so he smiled a divinely dull smile and said,

fumblingly saluting:

“Scoose me, mem Saheb, scoose me, Missy Saheb; Satan not prefer it,

please.”

Then some instinct revealed to them that he was drunk. They gave him

prompt notice that next time this happened he must go. He got out a

maudlin and most gentle “Wair good,” and saluted indefinitely.

Only one short week later he fell again. And oh, sorrow! not in a hotel

this time, but in an English gentleman's private house. And in Agra, of

all places. So he had to go. When I told him, he said patiently, “Wair

good,” and made his parting salute, and went out from us to return no

more forever. Dear me! I would rather have lost a hundred angels than

that one poor lovely devil. What style he used to put on, in a swell

hotel or in a private house—snow-white muslin from his chin to his bare

feet, a crimson sash embroidered with gold thread around his waist, and

on his head a great sea-green turban like to the turban of the Grand

Turk.

He was not a liar; but he will become one if he keeps on. He told me

once that he used to crack cocoanuts with his teeth when he was a boy;

and when I asked how he got them into his mouth, he said he was upward of

six feet high at that time, and had an unusual mouth. And when I

followed him up and asked him what had become of that other foot, he said

a house fell on him and he was never able to get his stature back again.

Swervings like these from the strict line of fact often beguile a

truthful man on and on until he eventually becomes a liar.

His successor was a Mohammedan, Sahadat Mohammed Khan; very dark, very

tall, very grave. He went always in flowing masses of white, from the

top of his big turban down to his bare feet. His voice was low. He

glided about in a noiseless way, and looked like a ghost. He was

competent and satisfactory. But where he was, it seemed always Sunday.

It was not so in Satan's time.

Jeypore is intensely Indian, but it has two or three features which

indicate the presence of European science and European interest in the

weal of the common public, such as the liberal water-supply furnished by

great works built at the State's expense; good sanitation, resulting in a

degree of healthfulness unusually high for India; a noble pleasure

garden, with privileged days for women; schools for the instruction of

native youth in advanced art, both ornamental and utilitarian; and a new

and beautiful palace stocked with a museum of extraordinary interest and

value. Without the Maharaja's sympathy and purse these beneficences

could not have been created; but he is a man of wide views and large

generosities, and all such matters find hospitality with him.

We drove often to the city from the hotel Kaiser-i-Hind, a journey which

was always full of interest, both night and day, for that country road

was never quiet, never empty, but was always India in motion, always a

streaming flood of brown people clothed in smouchings from the rainbow, a

tossing and moiling flood, happy, noisy, a charming and satisfying

confusion of strange human and strange animal life and equally strange

and outlandish vehicles.

And the city itself is a curiosity. Any Indian city is that, but this

one is not like any other that we saw. It is shut up in a lofty turreted

wall; the main body of it is divided into six parts by perfectly straight

streets that are more than a hundred feet wide; the blocks of houses

exhibit a long frontage of the most taking architectural quaintnesses,

the straight lines being broken everywhere by pretty little balconies,

pillared and highly ornamented, and other cunning and cozy and inviting

perches and projections, and many of the fronts are curiously pictured by

the brush, and the whole of them have the soft rich tint of strawberry

ice-cream. One cannot look down the far stretch of the chief street and

persuade himself that these are real houses, and that it is all out of

doors—the impression that it is an unreality, a picture, a scene in a

theater, is the only one that will take hold.

Then there came a great day when this illusion was more pronounced than

ever. A rich Hindoo had been spending a fortune upon the manufacture of

a crowd of idols and accompanying paraphernalia whose purpose was to

illustrate scenes in the life of his especial god or saint, and this fine

show was to be brought through the town in processional state at ten in

the morning. As we passed through the great public pleasure garden on

our way to the city we found it crowded with natives. That was one

sight. Then there was another. In the midst of the spacious lawns

stands the palace which contains the museum—a beautiful construction of

stone which shows arched colonnades, one above another, and receding,

terrace-fashion, toward the sky. Every one of these terraces, all the

way to the top one, was packed and jammed with natives. One must try to

imagine those solid masses of splendid color, one above another, up and

up, against the blue sky, and the Indian sun turning them all to beds of

fire and flame.

Later, when we reached the city, and glanced down the chief avenue,

smouldering in its crushed-strawberry tint, those splendid effects were

repeated; for every balcony, and every fanciful bird-cage of a snuggery

countersunk in the house-fronts, and all the long lines of roofs were

crowded with people, and each crowd was an explosion of brilliant color.

Then the wide street itself, away down and down and down into the

distance, was alive with gorgeously-clothed people not still, but moving,

swaying, drifting, eddying, a delirious display of all colors and all

shades of color, delicate, lovely, pale, soft, strong, stunning, vivid,

brilliant, a sort of storm of sweetpea blossoms passing on the wings of a

hurricane; and presently, through this storm of color, came swaying and

swinging the majestic elephants, clothed in their Sunday best of

gaudinesses, and the long procession of fanciful trucks freighted with

their groups of curious and costly images, and then the long rearguard of

stately camels, with their picturesque riders.

For color, and picturesqueness, and novelty, and outlandishness, and

sustained interest and fascination, it was the most satisfying show I had

ever seen, and I suppose I shall not have the privilege of looking upon

its like again.

CHAPTER LXI.

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made

School Boards.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

Suppose we applied no more ingenuity to the instruction of deaf and dumb

and blind children than we sometimes apply in our American public schools

to the instruction of children who are in possession of all their

faculties? The result would be that the deaf and dumb and blind would

acquire nothing. They would live and die as ignorant as bricks and

stones. The methods used in the asylums are rational. The teacher

exactly measures the child's capacity, to begin with; and from thence

onwards the tasks imposed are nicely gauged to the gradual development of

that capacity, the tasks keep pace with the steps of the child's

progress, they don't jump miles and leagues ahead of it by irrational

caprice and land in vacancy—according to the average public-school plan.

In the public school, apparently, they teach the child to spell cat, then

ask it to calculate an eclipse; when it can read words of two syllables,

they require it to explain the circulation of the blood; when it reaches

the head of the infant class they bully it with conundrums that cover the

domain of universal knowledge. This sounds extravagant—and is; yet it

goes no great way beyond the facts.

I received a curious letter one day, from the Punjab (you must pronounce

it Punjawb). The handwriting was excellent, and the wording was English

—English, and yet not exactly English. The style was easy and smooth

and flowing, yet there was something subtly foreign about it—something

tropically ornate and sentimental and rhetorical. It turned out to be

the work of a Hindoo youth, the holder of a humble clerical billet in a

railway office. He had been educated in one of the numerous colleges of

India. Upon inquiry I was told that the country was full of young

fellows of his like. They had been educated away up to the snow-summits

of learning—and the market for all this elaborate cultivation was

minutely out of proportion to the vastness of the product. This market

consisted of some thousands of small clerical posts under the government

—the supply of material for it was multitudinous. If this youth with

the

flowing style and the blossoming English was occupying a small railway

clerkship, it meant that there were hundreds and hundreds as capable as

he, or he would be in a high place; and it certainly meant that there

were thousands whose education and capacity had fallen a little short,

and that they would have to go without places. Apparently, then, the

colleges of India were doing what our high schools have long been doing

—richly over-supplying the market for highly-educated service; and

thereby

doing a damage to the scholar, and through him to the country.

At home I once made a speech deploring the injuries inflicted by the high

school in making handicrafts distasteful to boys who would have been

willing to make a living at trades and agriculture if they had but had

the good luck to stop with the common school. But I made no converts.

Not one, in a community overrun with educated idlers who were above

following their fathers' mechanical trades, yet could find no market for

their book-knowledge. The same mail that brought me the letter from the

Punjab, brought also a little book published by Messrs. Thacker, Spink &

Co., of Calcutta, which interested me, for both its preface and its

contents treated of this matter of over-education. In the preface occurs

this paragraph from the Calcutta Review. For “Government office” read

“drygoods clerkship” and it will fit more than one region of America:

“The education that we give makes the boys a little less clownish in

their manners, and more intelligent when spoken to by strangers. On

the other hand, it has made them less contented with their lot in

life, and less willing to work with their hands. The form which

discontent takes in this country is not of a healthy kind; for, the

Natives of India consider that the only occupation worthy of an

educated man is that of a writership in some office, and especially

in a Government office. The village schoolboy goes back to the plow

with the greatest reluctance; and the town schoolboy carries the

same discontent and inefficiency into his father's workshop.

Sometimes these ex-students positively refuse at first to work; and

more than once parents have openly expressed their regret that they

ever allowed their sons to be inveigled to school.”

The little book which I am quoting from is called “Indo-Anglian

Literature,” and is well stocked with “baboo” English—clerkly English,

booky English, acquired in the schools. Some of it is very funny,

—almost as funny, perhaps, as what you and I produce when we try to

write in a language not our own; but much of it is surprisingly correct

and free. If I were going to quote good English—but I am not. India is

well stocked with natives who speak it and write it as well as the best

of us. I merely wish to show some of the quaint imperfect attempts at

the use of our tongue. There are many letters in the book; poverty

imploring help—bread, money, kindness, office—generally an office, a

clerkship, some way to get food and a rag out of the applicant's

unmarketable education; and food not for himself alone, but sometimes for

a dozen helpless relations in addition to his own family; for those

people are astonishingly unselfish, and admirably faithful to their ties

of kinship. Among us I think there is nothing approaching it. Strange

as some of these wailing and supplicating letters are, humble and even

groveling as some of them are, and quaintly funny and confused as a

goodly number of them are, there is still a pathos about them, as a rule,

that checks the rising laugh and reproaches it. In the following letter

“father” is not to be read literally. In Ceylon a little native

beggar-girl embarrassed me by calling me father, although I knew she was

mistaken. I was so new that I did not know that she was merely following

the custom of the dependent and the supplicant.

“SIR,

“I pray please to give me some action (work) for I am very poor boy

I have no one to help me even so father for it so it seemed in thy

good sight, you give the Telegraph Office, and another work what is

your wish I am very poor boy, this understand what is your wish you

my father I am your son this understand what is your wish.

“Your Sirvent, P. C. B.”

Through ages of debasing oppression suffered by these people at the hands

of their native rulers, they come legitimately by the attitude and

language of fawning and flattery, and one must remember this in

mitigation when passing judgment upon the native character. It is common

in these letters to find the petitioner furtively trying to get at the

white man's soft religious side; even this poor boy baits his hook with a

macerated Bible-text in the hope that it may catch something if all else

fail.

Here is an application for the post of instructor in English to some

children:

“My Dear Sir or Gentleman, that your Petitioner has much

qualification in the Language of English to instruct the young boys;

I was given to understand that your of suitable children has to

acquire the knowledge of English language.”

As a sample of the flowery Eastern style, I will take a sentence or two

from a long letter written by a young native to the Lieutenant-Governor

of Bengal—an application for employment:

“HONORED AND MUCH RESPECTED SIR,

“I hope your honor will condescend to hear the tale of this poor

creature. I shall overflow with gratitude at this mark of your

royal condescension. The bird-like happiness has flown away from my

nest-like heart and has not hitherto returned from the period whence

the rose of my father's life suffered the autumnal breath of death,

in plain English he passed through the gates of Grave, and from that

hour the phantom of delight has never danced before me.”

It is all school-English, book-English, you see; and good enough, too,

all things considered. If the native boy had but that one study he would

shine, he would dazzle, no doubt. But that is not the case. He is

situated as are our public-school children—loaded down with an

over-freightage of other studies; and frequently they are as far beyond

the actual point of progress reached by him and suited to the stage of

development attained, as could be imagined by the insanest fancy.

Apparently—like our public-school boy—he must work, work, work, in

school and out, and play but little. Apparently—like our public-school

boy—his “education” consists in learning things, not the meaning of

them; he is fed upon the husks, not the corn. From several essays

written by native schoolboys in answer to the question of how they spend

their day, I select one—the one which goes most into detail:

“66. At the break of day I rises from my own bed and finish my

daily duty, then I employ myself till 8 o'clock, after which I

employ myself to bathe, then take for my body some sweet meat, and

just at 9 1/2 I came to school to attend my class duty, then at

2 1/2 P. M. I return from school and engage myself to do my natural

duty, then, I engage for a quarter to take my tiffin, then I study

till 5 P. M., after which I began to play anything which comes in

my head. After 8 1/2, half pass to eight we are began to sleep,

before sleeping I told a constable just 11 o' he came and rose us

from half pass eleven we began to read still morning.”

It is not perfectly clear, now that I come to cipher upon it. He gets up

at about 5 in the morning, or along there somewhere, and goes to bed

about fifteen or sixteen hours afterward—that much of it seems straight;

but why he should rise again three hours later and resume his studies

till morning is puzzling.

I think it is because he is studying history. History requires a world

of time and bitter hard work when your “education” is no further advanced

than the cat's; when you are merely stuffing yourself with a mixed-up

mess of empty names and random incidents and elusive dates, which no one

teaches you how to interpret, and which, uninterpreted, pay you not a

farthing's value for your waste of time. Yes, I think he had to get up

at halfpast 11 P.M. in order to be sure to be perfect with his history

lesson by noon. With results as follows—from a Calcutta school

examination:

“Q. Who was Cardinal Wolsey?

“Cardinal Wolsey was an Editor of a paper named North Briton. No. 45 of

his publication he charged the King of uttering a lie from the throne.

He was arrested and cast into prison; and after releasing went to France.

“3. As Bishop of York but died in disentry in a church on his way to be

blockheaded.

“8. Cardinal Wolsey was the son of Edward IV, after his father's death

he himself ascended the throne at the age of (10) ten only, but when he

surpassed or when he was fallen in his twenty years of age at that time

he wished to make a journey in his countries under him, but he was

opposed by his mother to do journey, and according to his mother's

example he remained in the home, and then became King. After many times

obstacles and many confusion he become King and afterwards his brother.”

There is probably not a word of truth in that.

“Q. What is the meaning of 'Ich Dien'?

“10. An honor conferred on the first or eldest sons of English

Sovereigns. It is nothing more than some feathers.

“11. Ich Dien was the word which was written on the feathers of the

blind King who came to fight, being interlaced with the bridles of the

horse.

“13. Ich Dien is a title given to Henry VII by the Pope of Rome, when he

forwarded the Reformation of Cardinal Wolsy to Rome, and for this reason

he was called Commander of the faith.”

A dozen or so of this kind of insane answers are quoted in the book from

that examination. Each answer is sweeping proof, all by itself, that the

person uttering it was pushed ahead of where he belonged when he was put

into history; proof that he had been put to the task of acquiring history

before he had had a single lesson in the art of acquiring it, which is

the equivalent of dumping a pupil into geometry before he has learned the

progressive steps which lead up to it and make its acquirement possible.

Those Calcutta novices had no business with history. There was no excuse

for examining them in it, no excuse for exposing them and their teachers.

They were totally empty; there was nothing to “examine.”

Helen Keller has been dumb, stone deaf, and stone blind, ever since she

was a little baby a year-and-a-half old; and now at sixteen years of age

this miraculous creature, this wonder of all the ages, passes the Harvard

University examination in Latin, German, French history, belles lettres,

and such things, and does it brilliantly, too, not in a commonplace

fashion. She doesn't know merely things, she is splendidly familiar with

the meanings of them. When she writes an essay on a Shakespearean

character, her English is fine and strong, her grasp of the subject is

the grasp of one who knows, and her page is electric with light. Has

Miss Sullivan taught her by the methods of India and the American public

school? No, oh, no; for then she would be deafer and dumber and blinder

than she was before. It is a pity that we can't educate all the children

in the asylums.

To continue the Calcutta exposure:

“What is the meaning of a Sheriff?”

“25. Sheriff is a post opened in the time of John. The duty of Sheriff

here in Calcutta, to look out and catch those carriages which is rashly

driven out by the coachman; but it is a high post in England.

“26. Sheriff was the English bill of common prayer.

“27. The man with whom the accusative persons are placed is called

Sheriff.

“28. Sheriff—Latin term for 'shrub,' we called broom, worn by the first

earl of Enjue, as an emblem of humility when they went to the pilgrimage,

and from this their hairs took their crest and surname.

“29. Sheriff is a kind of titlous sect of people, as Barons, Nobles,

etc.

“30. Sheriff; a tittle given on those persons who were respective and

pious in England.”

The students were examined in the following bulky matters: Geometry, the

Solar Spectrum, the Habeas Corpus Act, the British Parliament, and in

Metaphysics they were asked to trace the progress of skepticism from

Descartes to Hume. It is within bounds to say that some of the results

were astonishing. Without doubt, there were students present who

justified their teacher's wisdom in introducing them to these studies;

but the fact is also evident that others had been pushed into these

studies to waste their time over them when they could have been

profitably employed in hunting smaller game. Under the head of Geometry,

one of the answers is this:

“49. The whole BD = the whole CA, and so-so-so-so-so-so-so.”

To me this is cloudy, but I was never well up in geometry. That was the

only effort made among the five students who appeared for examination in

geometry; the other four wailed and surrendered without a fight. They

are piteous wails, too, wails of despair; and one of them is an eloquent

reproach; it comes from a poor fellow who has been laden beyond his

strength by a stupid teacher, and is eloquent in spite of the poverty of

its English. The poor chap finds himself required to explain riddles

which even Sir Isaac Newton was not able to understand:

“50. Oh my dear father examiner you my father and you kindly give a

number of pass you my great father.

“51. I am a poor boy and have no means to support my mother and two

brothers who are suffering much for want of food. I get four rupees

monthly from charity fund of this place, from which I send two rupees for

their support, and keep two for my own support. Father, if I relate the

unlucky circumstance under which we are placed, then, I think, you will

not be able to suppress the tender tear.

“52. Sir which Sir Isaac Newton and other experienced mathematicians

cannot understand I being third of Entrance Class can understand these

which is too impossible to imagine. And my examiner also has put very

tiresome and very heavy propositions to prove.”

We must remember that these pupils had to do their thinking in one

language, and express themselves in another and alien one. It was a

heavy handicap. I have by me “English as She is Taught”—a collection of

American examinations made in the public schools of Brooklyn by one of

the teachers, Miss Caroline B. Le Row. An extract or two from its pages

will show that when the American pupil is using but one language, and

that one his own, his performance is no whit better than his Indian

brother's:

“ON HISTORY.

“Christopher Columbus was called the father of his Country. Queen

Isabella of Spain sold her watch and chain and other millinery so that

Columbus could discover America.

“The Indian wars were very desecrating to the country.

“The Indians pursued their warfare by hiding in the bushes and then

scalping them.

“Captain John Smith has been styled the father of his country. His life

was saved by his daughter Pochahantas.

“The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America.

“The Stamp Act was to make everybody stamp all materials so they should

be null and void.

“Washington died in Spain almost broken-hearted. His remains were taken

to the cathedral in Havana.

“Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas.”

In Brooklyn, as in India, they examine a pupil, and when they find out he

doesn't know anything, they put him into literature, or geometry, or

astronomy, or government, or something like that, so that he can properly

display the assification of the whole system—

“ON LITERATURE.

“'Bracebridge Hall' was written by Henry Irving.

“Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer.

“Beowulf wrote the Scriptures.

“Ben Johnson survived Shakespeare in some respects.

“In the 'Canterbury Tale' it gives account of King Alfred on his way to

the shrine of Thomas Bucket.

“Chaucer was the father of English pottery.

“Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads. Longfellow.”

We will finish with a couple of samples of “literature,” one from

America, the other from India. The first is a Brooklyn public-school

boy's attempt to turn a few verses of the “Lady of the Lake” into prose.

You will have to concede that he did it:

“The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an instrument made

of steel alone with strong ardor not diminishing, for, being tired from

the time passed with hard labor overworked with anger and ignorant with

weariness, while every breath for labor he drew with cries full of

sorrow, the young deer made imperfect who worked hard filtered in sight.”

The following paragraph is from a little book which is famous in India

—the biography of a distinguished Hindoo judge, Onoocool Chunder

Mookerjee; it was written by his nephew, and is unintentionally funny-in

fact, exceedingly so. I offer here the closing scene. If you would like

to sample the rest of the book, it can be had by applying to the

publishers, Messrs. Thacker, Spink & Co., Calcutta

“And having said these words he hermetically sealed his lips not to

open them again. All the well-known doctors of Calcutta that could

be procured for a man of his position and wealth were brought,

—Doctors Payne, Fayrer, and Nilmadhub Mookerjee and others; they

did

what they could do, with their puissance and knack of medical

knowledge, but it proved after all as if to milk the ram! His wife

and children had not the mournful consolation to hear his last

words; he remained sotto voce for a few hours, and then was taken

from us at 6.12 P.m. according to the caprice of God which passeth

understanding.”

CHAPTER LXII.

There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined ones.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

We sailed from Calcutta toward the end of March; stopped a day at Madras;

two or three days in Ceylon; then sailed westward on a long flight for

Mauritius. From my diary:

April 7. We are far abroad upon the smooth waters of the Indian Ocean,

now; it is shady and pleasant and peaceful under the vast spread of the

awnings, and life is perfect again—ideal.

The difference between a river and the sea is, that the river looks

fluid, the sea solid—usually looks as if you could step out and walk on

it.

The captain has this peculiarity—he cannot tell the truth in a plausible

way. In this he is the very opposite of the austere Scot who sits midway

of the table; he cannot tell a lie in an unplausible way. When the

captain finishes a statement the passengers glance at each other

privately, as who should say, “Do you believe that?” When the Scot

finishes one, the look says, “How strange and interesting.” The whole

secret is in the manner and method of the two men. The captain is a

little shy and diffident, and he states the simplest fact as if he were a

little afraid of it, while the Scot delivers himself of the most

abandoned lie with such an air of stern veracity that one is forced to

believe it although one knows it isn't so. For instance, the Scot told

about a pet flying-fish he once owned, that lived in a little fountain in

his conservatory, and supported itself by catching birds and frogs and

rats in the neighboring fields. It was plain that no one at the table

doubted this statement.

By and by, in the course of some talk about custom-house annoyances, the

captain brought out the following simple everyday incident, but through

his infirmity of style managed to tell it in such a way that it got no

credence. He said:

“I went ashore at Naples one voyage when I was in that trade, and

stood around helping my passengers, for I could speak a little

Italian. Two or three times, at intervals, the officer asked me if

I had anything dutiable about me, and seemed more and more put out

and disappointed every time I told him no. Finally a passenger whom

I had helped through asked me to come out and take something. I

thanked him, but excused myself, saying I had taken a whisky just

before I came ashore.

“It was a fatal admission. The officer at once made me pay sixpence

import-duty on the whisky-just from ship to shore, you see; and he

fined me £5 for not declaring the goods, another £5 for falsely

denying that I had anything dutiable about me, also £5 for

concealing the goods, and £50 for smuggling, which is the maximum

penalty for unlawfully bringing in goods under the value of

sevenpence ha'penny. Altogether, sixty-five pounds sixpence for a

little thing like that.”

The Scot is always believed, yet he never tells anything but lies;

whereas the captain is never believed, although he never tells a lie, so

far as I can judge. If he should say his uncle was a male person, he

would probably say it in such a way that nobody would believe it; at the

same time the Scot could claim that he had a female uncle and not stir a

doubt in anybody's mind. My own luck has been curious all my literary

life; I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that

anybody would believe.

Lots of pets on board—birds and things. In these far countries the

white people do seem to run remarkably to pets. Our host in Cawnpore had

a fine collection of birds—the finest we saw in a private house in

India. And in Colombo, Dr. Murray's great compound and commodious

bungalow were well populated with domesticated company from the woods:

frisky little squirrels; a Ceylon mina walking sociably about the house;

a small green parrot that whistled a single urgent note of call without

motion of its beak; also chuckled; a monkey in a cage on the back

veranda, and some more out in the trees; also a number of beautiful

macaws in the trees; and various and sundry birds and animals of breeds

not known to me. But no cat. Yet a cat would have liked that place.

April 9. Tea-planting is the great business in Ceylon, now. A passenger

says it often pays 40 per cent. on the investment. Says there is a boom.

April 10. The sea is a Mediterranean blue; and I believe that that is

about the divinest color known to nature.

It is strange and fine—Nature's lavish generosities to her creatures.

At least to all of them except man. For those that fly she has provided

a home that is nobly spacious—a home which is forty miles deep and

envelops the whole globe, and has not an obstruction in it. For those

that swim she has provided a more than imperial domain—a domain which is

miles deep and covers four-fifths of the globe. But as for man, she has

cut him off with the mere odds and ends of the creation. She has given

him the thin skin, the meagre skin which is stretched over the remaining

one-fifth—the naked bones stick up through it in most places. On the

one-half of this domain he can raise snow, ice, sand, rocks, and nothing

else. So the valuable part of his inheritance really consists of but a

single fifth of the family estate; and out of it he has to grub hard to

get enough to keep him alive and provide kings and soldiers and powder to

extend the blessings of civilization with. Yet man, in his simplicity

and complacency and inability to cipher, thinks Nature regards him as the

important member of the family—in fact, her favorite. Surely, it must

occur to even his dull head, sometimes, that she has a curious way of

showing it.

Afternoon. The captain has been telling how, in one of his Arctic

voyages, it was so cold that the mate's shadow froze fast to the deck and

had to be ripped loose by main strength. And even then he got only about

two-thirds of it back. Nobody said anything, and the captain went away.

I think he is becoming disheartened . . . . Also, to be fair, there

is another word of praise due to this ship's library: it contains no copy

of the Vicar of Wakefield, that strange menagerie of complacent

hypocrites and idiots, of theatrical cheap-john heroes and heroines, who

are always showing off, of bad people who are not interesting, and good

people who are fatiguing. A singular book. Not a sincere line in it,

and not a character that invites respect; a book which is one long

waste-pipe discharge of goody-goody puerilities and dreary moralities; a

book which is full of pathos which revolts, and humor which grieves the

heart. There are few things in literature that are more piteous, more

pathetic, than the celebrated “humorous” incident of Moses and the

spectacles. Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just

that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library

that hadn't a book in it.

Customs in tropic seas. At 5 in the morning they pipe to wash down the

decks, and at once the ladies who are sleeping there turn out and they

and their beds go below. Then one after another the men come up from the

bath in their pyjamas, and walk the decks an hour or two with bare legs

and bare feet. Coffee and fruit served. The ship cat and her kitten now

appear and get about their toilets; next the barber comes and flays us on

the breezy deck. Breakfast at 9.30, and the day begins. I do not know

how a day could be more reposeful: no motion; a level blue sea; nothing

in sight from horizon to horizon; the speed of the ship furnishes a

cooling breeze; there is no mail to read and answer; no newspapers to

excite you; no telegrams to fret you or fright you—the world is far, far

away; it has ceased to exist for you—seemed a fading dream, along in the

first days; has dissolved to an unreality now; it is gone from your mind

with all its businesses and ambitions, its prosperities and disasters,

its exultations and despairs, its joys and griefs and cares and worries.

They are no concern of yours any more; they have gone out of your life;

they are a storm which has passed and left a deep calm behind. The

people group themselves about the decks in their snowy white linen, and

read, smoke, sew, play cards, talk, nap, and so on. In other ships the

passengers are always ciphering about when they are going to arrive; out

in these seas it is rare, very rare, to hear that subject broached. In

other ships there is always an eager rush to the bulletin board at noon

to find out what the “run” has been; in these seas the bulletin seems to

attract no interest; I have seen no one visit it; in thirteen days I have

visited it only once. Then I happened to notice the figures of the day's

run. On that day there happened to be talk, at dinner, about the speed

of modern ships. I was the only passenger present who knew this ship's

gait. Necessarily, the Atlantic custom of betting on the ship's run is

not a custom here—nobody ever mentions it.

I myself am wholly indifferent as to when we are going to “get in”; if

any one else feels interested in the matter he has not indicated it in my

hearing. If I had my way we should never get in at all. This sort of

sea life is charged with an indestructible charm. There is no weariness,

no fatigue, no worry, no responsibility, no work, no depression of

spirits. There is nothing like this serenity, this comfort, this peace,

this deep contentment, to be found anywhere on land. If I had my way I

would sail on for ever and never go to live on the solid ground again.

One of Kipling's ballads has delivered the aspect and sentiment of this

bewitching sea correctly:

“The Injian Ocean sets an' smiles

So sof', so bright, so bloomin' blue;

There aren't a wave for miles an' miles

Excep' the jiggle from the screw.”

April 14. It turns out that the astronomical apprentice worked off a

section of the Milky Way on me for the Magellan Clouds. A man of more

experience in the business showed one of them to me last night. It was

small and faint and delicate, and looked like the ghost of a bunch of

white smoke left floating in the sky by an exploded bombshell.

Wednesday, April 15. Mauritius. Arrived and anchored off Port Louis

2 A. M. Rugged clusters of crags and peaks, green to their summits; from

their bases to the sea a green plain with just tilt enough to it to make

the water drain off. I believe it is in 56 degrees E. and 22 degrees S.

—a hot tropical country. The green plain has an inviting look; has

scattering dwellings nestling among the greenery. Scene of the

sentimental adventure of Paul and Virginia.

Island under French control—which means a community which depends upon

quarantines, not sanitation, for its health.

Thursday, April 16. Went ashore in the forenoon at Port Louis, a little

town, but with the largest variety of nationalities and complexions we

have encountered yet. French, English, Chinese, Arabs, Africans with

wool, blacks with straight hair, East Indians, half-whites, quadroons

—and great varieties in costumes and colors.

Took the train for Curepipe at 1.30—two hours' run, gradually uphill.

What a contrast, this frantic luxuriance of vegetation, with the arid

plains of India; these architecturally picturesque crags and knobs and

miniature mountains, with the monotony of the Indian dead-levels.

A native pointed out a handsome swarthy man of grave and dignified

bearing, and said in an awed tone, “That is so-and-so; has held office of

one sort or another under this government for 37 years—he is known all

over this whole island and in the other countries of the world perhaps

—who knows? One thing is certain; you can speak his name anywhere in

this

whole island, and you will find not one grown person that has not heard

it. It is a wonderful thing to be so celebrated; yet look at him; it

makes no change in him; he does not even seem to know it.”

Curepipe (means Pincushion or Pegtown, probably). Sixteen miles (two

hours) by rail from Port Louis. At each end of every roof and on the

apex of every dormer window a wooden peg two feet high stands up; in some

cases its top is blunt, in others the peg is sharp and looks like a

toothpick. The passion for this humble ornament is universal.

Apparently, there has been only one prominent event in the history of

Mauritius, and that one didn't happen. I refer to the romantic sojourn

of Paul and Virginia here. It was that story that made Mauritius known

to the world, made the name familiar to everybody, the geographical

position of it to nobody.

A clergyman was asked to guess what was in a box on a table. It was a

vellum fan painted with the shipwreck, and was “one of Virginia's wedding

gifts.”

April 18. This is the only country in the world where the stranger is

not asked “How do you like this place?” This is indeed a large

distinction. Here the citizen does the talking about the country

himself; the stranger is not asked to help. You get all sorts of

information. From one citizen you gather the idea that Mauritius was

made first, and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.

Another one tells you that this is an exaggeration; that the two chief

villages, Port Louis and Curepipe, fall short of heavenly perfection;

that nobody lives in Port Louis except upon compulsion, and that Curepipe

is the wettest and rainiest place in the world. An English citizen said:

“In the early part of this century Mauritius was used by the French

as a basis from which to operate against England's Indian

merchantmen; so England captured the island and also the neighbor,

Bourbon, to stop that annoyance. England gave Bourbon back; the

government in London did not want any more possessions in the West

Indies. If the government had had a better quality of geography in

stock it would not have wasted Bourbon in that foolish way. A big

war will temporarily shut up the Suez Canal some day and the English

ships will have to go to India around the Cape of Good Hope again;

then England will have to have Bourbon and will take it.

“Mauritius was a crown colony until 20 years ago, with a governor

appointed by the Crown and assisted by a Council appointed by

himself; but Pope Hennessey came out as Governor then, and he worked

hard to get a part of the council made elective, and succeeded. So

now the whole council is French, and in all ordinary matters of

legislation they vote together and in the French interest, not the

English. The English population is very slender; it has not votes

enough to elect a legislator. Half a dozen rich French families

elect the legislature. Pope Hennessey was an Irishman, a Catholic,

a Home Ruler, M.P., a hater of England and the English, a very

troublesome person and a serious incumbrance at Westminster; so it

was decided to send him out to govern unhealthy countries, in hope

that something would happen to him. But nothing did. The first

experiment was not merely a failure, it was more than a failure. He

proved to be more of a disease himself than any he was sent to

encounter. The next experiment was here. The dark scheme failed

again. It was an off-season and there was nothing but measles here

at the time. Pope Hennessey's health was not affected. He worked

with the French and for the French and against the English, and he

made the English very tired and the French very happy, and lived to

have the joy of seeing the flag he served publicly hissed. His

memory is held in worshipful reverence and affection by the French.

“It is a land of extraordinary quarantines. They quarantine a ship

for anything or for nothing; quarantine her for 20 and even 30 days.

They once quarantined a ship because her captain had had the

smallpox when he was a boy. That and because he was English.

“The population is very small; small to insignificance. The

majority is East Indian; then mongrels; then negroes (descendants of

the slaves of the French times); then French; then English. There

was an American, but he is dead or mislaid. The mongrels are the

result of all kinds of mixtures; black and white, mulatto and white,

quadroon and white, octoroon and white. And so there is every shade

of complexion; ebony, old mahogany, horsechestnut, sorrel,

molasses-candy, clouded amber, clear amber, old-ivory white,

new-ivory white, fish-belly white—this latter the leprous

complexion

frequent with the Anglo-Saxon long resident in tropical climates.

“You wouldn't expect a person to be proud of being a Mauritian, now

would you? But it is so. The most of them have never been out of

the island, and haven't read much or studied much, and they think

the world consists of three principal countries—Judaea, France, and

Mauritius; so they are very proud of belonging to one of the three

grand divisions of the globe. They think that Russia and Germany

are in England, and that England does not amount to much. They have

heard vaguely about the United States and the equator, but they

think both of them are monarchies. They think Mount Peter Botte is

the highest mountain in the world, and if you show one of them a

picture of Milan Cathedral he will swell up with satisfaction and

say that the idea of that jungle of spires was stolen from the

forest of peg-tops and toothpicks that makes the roofs of Curepipe

look so fine and prickly.

“There is not much trade in books. The newspapers educate and

entertain the people. Mainly the latter. They have two pages of

large-print reading-matter—one of them English, the other French.

The English page is a translation of the French one. The typography

is super-extra primitive—in this quality it has not its equal

anywhere. There is no proof-reader now; he is dead.

“Where do they get matter to fill up a page in this little island

lost in the wastes of the Indian Ocean? Oh, Madagascar. They

discuss Madagascar and France. That is the bulk. Then they chock

up the rest with advice to the Government. Also, slurs upon the

English administration. The papers are all owned and edited by

creoles—French.

“The language of the country is French. Everybody speaks it—has

to. You have to know French particularly mongrel French, the patois

spoken by Tom, Dick, and Harry of the multiform complexions—or you

can't get along.

“This was a flourishing country in former days, for it made then and

still makes the best sugar in the world; but first the Suez Canal severed

it from the world and left it out in the cold and next the beetroot sugar

helped by bounties, captured the European markets. Sugar is the life of

Mauritius, and it is losing its grip. Its downward course was checked by

the depreciation of the rupee—for the planter pays wages in rupees but

sells his crop for gold—and the insurrection in Cuba and paralyzation of

the sugar industry there have given our prices here a life-saving lift;

but the outlook has nothing permanently favorable about it. It takes a

year to mature the canes—on the high ground three and six months longer

—and there is always a chance that the annual cyclone will rip the

profit out of the crop. In recent times a cyclone took the whole crop,

as you may say; and the island never saw a finer one. Some of the

noblest sugar estates in the island are in deep difficulties. A dozen of

them are investments of English capital; and the companies that own them

are at work now, trying to settle up and get out with a saving of half

the money they put in. You know, in these days, when a country begins to

introduce the tea culture, it means that its own specialty has gone back

on it. Look at Bengal; look at Ceylon. Well, they've begun to introduce

the tea culture, here.

“Many copies of Paul and Virginia are sold every year in Mauritius. No

other book is so popular here except the Bible. By many it is supposed

to be a part of the Bible. All the missionaries work up their French on

it when they come here to pervert the Catholic mongrel. It is the

greatest story that was ever written about Mauritius, and the only one.”

CHAPTER LXIII.

The principal difference between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only

nine lives.

—Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

April 20.—The cyclone of 1892 killed and crippled hundreds of people;

it was accompanied by a deluge of rain, which drowned Port Louis and

produced a water famine. Quite true; for it burst the reservoir and the

water-pipes; and for a time after the flood had disappeared there was

much distress from want of water.

This is the only place in the world where no breed of matches can stand

the damp. Only one match in 16 will light.

The roads are hard and smooth; some of the compounds are spacious, some

of the bungalows commodious, and the roadways are walled by tall bamboo

hedges, trim and green and beautiful; and there are azalea hedges, too,

both the white and the red; I never saw that before.

As to healthiness: I translate from to-day's (April 20) Merchants' and

Planters' Gazette, from the article of a regular contributor, “Carminge,”

concerning the death of the nephew of a prominent citizen:

“Sad and lugubrious existence, this which we lead in Mauritius; I

believe there is no other country in the world where one dies more

easily than among us. The least indisposition becomes a mortal

malady; a simple headache develops into meningitis; a cold into

pneumonia, and presently, when we are least expecting it, death is a

guest in our home.”

This daily paper has a meteorological report which tells you what the

weather was day before yesterday.

One is never pestered by a beggar or a peddler in this town, so far as I

can see. This is pleasantly different from India.

April 22. To such as believe that the quaint product called French

civilization would be an improvement upon the civilization of New Guinea

and the like, the snatching of Madagascar and the laying on of French

civilization there will be fully justified. But why did the English

allow the French to have Madagascar? Did she respect a theft of a couple

of centuries ago? Dear me, robbery by European nations of each other's

territories has never been a sin, is not a sin to-day. To the several

cabinets the several political establishments of the world are

clotheslines; and a large part of the official duty of these cabinets is

to keep an eye on each other's wash and grab what they can of it as

opportunity offers. All the territorial possessions of all the political

establishments in the earth—including America, of course—consist of

pilferings from other people's wash. No tribe, howsoever insignificant,

and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not

stolen. When the English, the French, and the Spaniards reached America,

the Indian tribes had been raiding each other's territorial clothes-lines

for ages, and every acre of ground in the continent had been stolen and

re-stolen 500 times. The English, the French, and the Spaniards went to

work and stole it all over again; and when that was satisfactorily

accomplished they went diligently to work and stole it from each other.

In Europe and Asia and Africa every acre of ground has been stolen

several millions of times. A crime persevered in a thousand centuries

ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom,

and custom supersedes all other forms of law. Christian governments are

as frank to-day, as open and above-board, in discussing projects for

raiding each other's clothes-lines as ever they were before the Golden

Rule came smiling into this inhospitable world and couldn't get a night's

lodging anywhere. In 150 years England has beneficently retired garment

after garment from the Indian lines, until there is hardly a rag of the

original wash left dangling anywhere. In 800 years an obscure

tribe of Muscovite savages has risen to the dazzling position of

Land-Robber-in-Chief; she found a quarter of the world hanging out to dry

on a hundred parallels of latitude, and she scooped in the whole wash.

She keeps a sharp eye on a multitude of little lines that stretch along

the northern boundaries of India, and every now and then she snatches a

hip-rag or a pair of pyjamas. It is England's prospective property, and

Russia knows it; but Russia cares nothing for that. In fact, in our day

land-robbery, claim-jumping, is become a European governmental frenzy.

Some have been hard at it in the borders of China, in Burma, in Siam, and

the islands of the sea; and all have been at it in Africa. Africa has

been as coolly divided up and portioned out among the gang as if they had

bought it and paid for it. And now straightway they are beginning the

old game again—to steal each other's grabbings. Germany found a vast

slice of Central Africa with the English flag and the English missionary

and the English trader scattered all over it, but with certain

formalities neglected—no signs up, “Keep off the grass,”

“Trespassers-forbidden,” etc.—and she stepped in with a cold calm smile

and put up the signs herself, and swept those English pioneers promptly

out of the country.

There is a tremendous point there. It can be put into the form of a

maxim: Get your formalities right—never mind about the moralities.