“For know, O Kitmudgar, that there is one beauty of women, and another beauty of scorpions; and if the beauty of scorpions be to thee as the ugliness of women, the fault is in thy godless eye.

“‘Only a crawling kafir,’ sayest thou, O heathen! and straightway goest about to stick a fork into a political symbol?  Verily, the hapless wretch shall be sacrificed unto Agnee, god of Fire, that a timely warning may enter into thy purblind soul!

“Here, take this bottle of brandy,—­’Sahib brandy,’ you perceive,—­genuine old ’London Dock,’—­and pour a cordon of ardent spirits on the table, to ‘weave a circle round him thrice.’  So! that’s for British Ascendency!

“Now drop your subjugated brother into the midst thereof.  See how, in his senseless, drunken rage, he wriggles and squirms,—­then desperately dashes, and venomously snaps!  That’s Indian Revolt!

“Quickly, now! light the train; so!—­What think you of Anglo-Saxon power and hereditary pride?

“Oho, my Kitmudgar! you begin to understand!—­the living fable is not lost on you!

“But watch your Great Mogul!  Barrackpore, Meerut, Cawnpore, Lucknow, Delhi,—­five imposing plunges, but impotent; for at every point the Sahib’s fatal fire, fire, fire, fire, fire!—­insurmountable, all-subduing ‘destiny’!

“Maimed, discomfited, dismayed, shivering, at wits’ end, a crippled wriggler, in the midst of the exulting flames,—­there lies your Great Mogul!

“But see!—­the scorpion, brave wretch! with a gladiator’s fortitude, loosens the shameful coil in which its last agonies have twisted it, fiercely erects its head once more, lashes defiantly with its tail, and then—­click! click! click!—­stings itself to death.

“And with that ends our figure of speech; for only the pitifulness of the defeat is the Great Mogul’s; the sublimity of suicide is proper to the scorpion alone.

“Take away the fable, Kitmudgar!”

I lay in bed this morning half an hour after the sun had risen, watching my Parsee neighbor on his house-top, and thereby lost my drive on the Esplanade.  But I console myself with imagining that the pretty Chee-chee spinster who comes every morning from Raneemoody Gully in a green tonjon, and makes romantic eyes at me through the silk curtains, missed the Boston gentleman with the gray moustache, and was lonesome.

My Parsee neighbor is quite as fat, but by no means as saucy, as ever.  Last week his youngest boy died,—­little Kirsajee Samsajee Bonnarjee, a contemplative young fire-worshipper, with eyes as profound as the philosophy of Zoroaster.  I saw the dismal procession depart from the house, and my heart ached for the little Gheber.

Four awful creatures, that were like ghosts, clad all in white, solemnly dumb and veiled, bore him away on an iron bier.  When they arrived at the drawbridge, great sheets of copper were spread before them, and they crossed upon those; for wood is sacred to their adored Element, and the touch of “them on whose shoulders the dead doth ride” would pollute it.