Reeking with inherited consumption, they live the one life which is certain to kill them before they are forty.  Wet through and chilled, they are called upon again and again to suddenly exert enormous strength, since no man can desert his cart.  He must “get there.”  He must get out of his trouble.  He eats largely when and how he can, and when he has saved any money the merry “Taba” bone charms it from him in a way too universal perhaps to call for any remark.  Sometimes he finishes his carting days through too decided opinions as to the other man’s integrity in playing “Taba”; sometimes on his canvas bed in a hut of mud and branches, his browny yellow face and sunken eyes asking no pity, betraying no emotion; in either case he is rarely over thirty-five and often leaves a wife and children.

I say “wife and children,” since it sounds the usual thing; but, as a matter of strict fact, the ceremony of getting married is deprecated among them, as it signifies “Putting on side,” and is only resorted to when they are in a village and there is a chance that the presents that are given will more than compensate the tremendous expense they have to go to.  Speaking to a gentleman of this kidney, I was informed that when the cross-eyed blacksmith Strike got married, it cost him three dollars and a-half (say 5s.) in fire crackers alone, and my informant went on to say that the only case he knew of where marriage had been really successful was that of the fair-haired carpenter, who was married and asked all the bosses on the place, who each gave something, with which he was able to buy a sewing machine for the eldest girl, then aged six.

But, mark you, lest you should judge them lightly, remember that their unwritten pact is just as binding to them as our formal marriage tie is to us, and that in their way they are probably better husbands and fathers than your Balham clerk.  In their young days they may chop and change, which changes are generally marked by little iron crosses in the woods, but, once they have settled down, desertion is far rarer than in civilised countries.  I have seen a native workman with his shoulder blade in his arm-pit, his face cut to ribbons, and with pieces of casting sticking to his back through the carrying away of a crane, cavil against the idea of being taken into the township where the doctor was, lest his old woman, unused to a town life, should find the surroundings uncongenial.  This in a broken, muttered whisper, twelve hours after the accident had happened, during which time every new arrival had been called upon to witness the peculiar nature of his injuries.

Much has been said about the terrible wickedness of the lower-class native, his gambling, his immorality, his almost fanatical desire to murder everyone he sees; and for complete and detailed lists of crimes and monstrosities appeal to any newcomer, who will be delighted to hold forth on the subject; but when one has lived with them and worked with them under varying conditions, and has suffered in some degree what they suffer, one hesitates to condemn them offhand.