As we passed homewards down the street we heard the woman in the upper chamber still singing her prayer, but with a note of hope in its cadence:—­

  “O dilruba tu gam na kho, khuda hamen baham kare”
  “Janejahan bhulo nahi, karim sada karam kare.” 
  “Grieve not, heart of my heart, for God will
      order our meeting!  Soul of the world,
      forget not; and may the peace of God be
      on us twain.”

Perchance she also, like Fateh Muhammad’s guests, had caught a message of good hap from out the darkness.

And so back to the light and the noise of the City’s greatest artery.

XX.

THE TILAK RIOTS.

A REMINISCENCE.

(Written August. 1908)

Affairs in the City may now be regarded as having resumed their normal course, and the chance of further disorder seems for the present to have been obviated.  One of the most curious features of the disturbances was the difference of feeling exhibited by the two classes of mill-operatives, namely the Ghatis and the Malwanis.  Of the whole mill-population one would have assumed that the Kunbis from the Deccan, where Tilak is stated to have so great a following, would have shown a greater disposition to riot in consequence of his arrest and conviction than the men from Ratnagiri.  And yet so far as I could judge the Ghatis were far less interested in the trial and were much less disposed to express their resentment than the latter class, which comprises one or two extremely hot-headed and uncompromising individuals.  The Ghatis of Sewri indeed at the very height of the riots, informed an Englishman with whom they are familiar, that they would sooner die for him than do him any harm, and their words carried home the conviction that they felt no personal sorrow at Tilak’s well-deserved fate and that they would be ready in an emergency, as they have often been in past history, to stand staunchly by the side of any individual whom they know and who has been kind to them.  The attitude of the Ratnagiri hands must in my opinion have been engendered by continuous and careful tuition; and this was particularly the case in the Currey Road and Delisle Road areas where agents, belonging to their own native district, had been suborned by the seditionary party to stir up trouble.

No less remarkable was the quaint juxtaposition during the height of the riots of seething disorder and the quiet prosecution of their daily avocations by the bulk of the people.  An officer of one of the regiments quartered on the City during the trial in the High Court gave expression to this fact in the following words:—­“Warfare I understand; but this sort of business beats me altogether.  At the top of the street there is a native ‘tamasha’ with people singing and beating tom-toms; half-way down the street there are stone-throwing and firing, and at the bottom of the street there are people,