involving a generous sacrifice of prejudice.  As she made her modest salaam, and, in the manner of a shy child, sank to the floor in the habitual posture of an ayah, I had before me the well-preserved remains of a Hindoo beauty, according to the standard of the Shasters,—­a placid, reposeful woman, almost fat, with rather delicate features of Rajpoot fairness, the complexion of high caste, wealth, and ease, such as her less-favored sisters vainly strive to imitate with a sort of saffron rouge.  Her expression was chaste and gentle, her voice dulcet; and to the practice of carrying light burdens on her head she was indebted for a carriage erect and graceful.  On Broadway or Tremont Street, Mrs. Karlee would have passed for a very comely colored woman.  If she was not like Rama, fair as the jasmine, or the moon, or the fibres of the lotos, neither had she, like Krishna, the complexion of a cloud.  If she was not so delicate as that dainty beauty who bewitched the hard heart of Surajah Dowlah, and weighed but sixty-four pounds, neither did she reproduce the unwieldy charms of that Venus of one of the Shasters “whose gait was the gait of a drunken elephant or a goose.”  A prudent man, says the Vishnoo Pooran, will not marry a woman who has a beard, or one who has thick ankles, or one who speaks with a shrill voice, or one who croaks like a raven, or one whose eyebrows meet, or one whose teeth resemble tusks.  And Karlee was a prudent man.

From the extravagant and clumsy complications, the stupid caprices and discords, and studious indecencies of our women’s fashions, to the prudent simplicity, the unconscious poetry and picturesqueness and musically blended modesty and freedom of the good ayah’s unchangeable attire, my thought reverts with a mingled sense of refreshment and regret.  A single web of cloth, eight or nine yards long, having a narrow blue border, was drawn in self-forming folds around her shoulders and bosom, and hung down to her feet,—­the material muslin, the texture somewhat coarse, the color white.  No dressmaker had ever played fantastic tricks with it:  it was pure and simple in its entireness as it came from the loom.

Other women, of the laboring class, and very poor, passed to and fro on the street, half naked, their legs and shoulders bare, and with only a piece of dirty cloth—­blue, red, or yellow—­around the loins and hips; while here and there some superfine baboo’s wife floated past in her close palanquin, or sat with her children on the flat roof of her house, or peeped through her narrow windows into the street, arrayed in fancy bodice and petticoat,—­Mohammedan fashion.