“There—­that’s Satan.  Why do you keep him?”

And, sure enough, there in the whirling midst of fifteen hundred wondering people we would find that little scrap of a creature gesticulating like a spider with the colic, his black eyes snapping, his fez-tassel dancing, his jaws pouring out floods of billingsgate upon his gang of beseeching and astonished coolies.

I loved him; I couldn’t help it; but the family—­why, they could hardly speak of him with patience.  To this day I regret his loss, and wish I had him back; but they—­it is different with them.  He was a native, and came from Surat.  Twenty degrees of latitude lay between his birthplace and Manuel’s, and fifteen hundred between their ways and characters and dispositions.  I only liked Manuel, but I loved Satan.  This latter’s real name was intensely Indian.  I could not quite get the hang of it, but it sounded like Bunder Rao Ram Chunder Clam Chowder.  It was too long for handy use, anyway; so I reduced it.

When he had been with us two or three weeks, he began to make mistakes which I had difficulty in patching up for him.  Approaching Benares one day, he got out of the train to see if he could get up a misunderstanding with somebody, for it had been a weary, long journey and he wanted to freshen up.  He found what he was after, but kept up his pow-wow a shade too long and got left.  So there we were in a strange city and no chambermaid.  It was awkward for us, and we told him he must not do so any more.  He saluted and said in his dear, pleasant way, “Wair good.”  Then at Lucknow he got drunk.  I said it was a fever, and got the family’s compassion, and solicitude aroused; so they gave him a teaspoonful of liquid quinine and it set his vitals on fire.  He made several grimaces which gave me a better idea of the Lisbon earthquake than any I have ever got of it from paintings and descriptions.  His drunk was still portentously solid next morning, but I could have pulled him through with the family if he would only have taken another spoonful of that remedy; but no, although he was stupefied, his memory still had flickerings of life; so he smiled a divinely dull smile and said, fumblingly saluting: 

“Scoose me, mem Saheb, scoose me, Missy Saheb; Satan not prefer it, please.”

Then some instinct revealed to them that he was drunk.  They gave him prompt notice that next time this happened he must go.  He got out a maudlin and most gentle “Wair good,” and saluted indefinitely.

Only one short week later he fell again.  And oh, sorrow! not in a hotel this time, but in an English gentleman’s private house.  And in Agra, of all places.  So he had to go.  When I told him, he said patiently, “Wair good,” and made his parting salute, and went out from us to return no more forever.  Dear me!  I would rather have lost a hundred angels than that one poor lovely devil.  What style he used to put on, in a swell hotel or in a private house—­snow-white muslin from his chin to his bare feet, a crimson sash embroidered with gold thread around his waist, and on his head a great sea-green turban like to the turban of the Grand Turk.