a friend of Karlee’s, a smart sircar,[10] in the employ of a banyan,[11] the bhearer resting strictly in the background, a silent partner, and limiting his co-operation to the prompt furnishing of capital, which consisted not of rupees merely, but of many a cunning hint as well, as to the tastes, ways, and weaknesses of his customers.  It was a mutual understanding:  we knew of Karlee’s interest in these sentimental “operations,” and we openly patronized him; he knew which of us had wives, and which sweethearts, across the black water, and he mysteriously patronized us.  On that subject my heathen was always at home; and so it happened, by a happy dispensation of cause and effect, that at home he lived like a gentleman.

Through narrow, dingy miles of scrambling bazaar, redolent of all the unfragrances of that dusty, sweaty, greasy, jabbering quarter, I rolled in my light buggy, behind a nimble Arab mare, to a suburban retreat on the eastern skirt of the Black Town, where, just beyond a cluster of mean huts of the sooa-logue, the low laboring rabble, I found Karlee’s genteel abode, and was refreshed by the contrast it presented to the hovel of his next neighbor, whose single windowless apartment, and walls of alternate rows of straw and reeds, plastered with mud, proclaimed most unpicturesquely the hard fate of him who springs from the soles of Brahma’s feet.  Karlee’s walls were of solid clay of substantial thickness.  His floor was raised a foot or two above the ground, and there was a neatly thatched roof over all, swelling out in an elongated dome, and oddly resembling an inverted boat.  As in the rural districts, Karlee had fenced in his privacy with a thick hedge of clipped bamboo surmounting a quadrangular embankment.  Before the grateful porch two beautiful tamarind-trees and a palm bestowed their kindly shade, and in the hedge the bamboos, with their golden stems and bright green leaves, rustled cheerfully.

On the other side of the road, and shyly retired from it in a close bamboo covert, dwelt Karlee’s partner in the curiosity and general fancy line, the sharp sircar, with whom (both being soodras,[12] and of the same sect) his social relations were intimate and free.  The sircar, having thriven under the patronage of more than one rich and liberal baboo,[13] to whose favor he had recommended himself by his business alertness and his ever-politic compliance, had attained unto the honor of a brick house of two stories, plastered and whitewashed without and within, with a flat roof, having a low parapet, and laid with a rain-proof composition of clay and lime.  Though his stairs are narrow, his veranda is commodious; and when he shall have made his fortune in the curiosity and general fancy line, he will have wings, with a central area open to the sky, and a double veranda with a lattice.  Then, his accommodations being sufficiently enlarged, the proudest wish of his heart shall be gratified in the reunion of his entire family—­children and grandchildren, even uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces—­under the same roof.