On the step of the return to their Indian clime, they speak of the hatted sect, which is most, or most commercially, succoured and fattened by our rule there:  they wave adieu to the conquering Islanders, as to ’Parsees beneath a cloud.’

The two are seen last on the deck of the vessel, in perusal of a medical pamphlet composed of statistics and sketches, traceries, horrid blots, diagrams with numbers referring to notes, of the various maladies caused by the prolonged prosecution of that form of worship.

‘But can they suffer so and live?’ exclaims the Rajah, vexed by the physical sympathetic twinges which set him wincing.

‘Science,’ his Minister answers, ’took them up where Nature, in pity of their martyrdom, dropped them.  They do not live; they are engines, insensible things of repairs and patches; insteamed to pursue their infuriate course, to the one end of exhausting supplies for the renewing of them, on peril of an instant suspension if they deviate a step or stop:  nor do they.’

The Rajah is of opinion, that he sails home with the key of the riddle of their power to vanquish.  In some apparent allusion to an Indian story of a married couple who successfully made their way, he accounts for their solid and resistless advance, resembling that of—­

             The doubly-wedded man and wife,
        Pledged to each other and against the world
        With mutual union.

One would like to think of the lengthened tide-flux of pedestrian citizens facing South-westward, as being drawn by devout attraction to our nourishing luminary:  at the hour, mark, when the Norland cloud-king, after a day of wild invasion, sits him on his restful bank of bluefish smack-o’-cheek red above Whitechapel, to spy where his last puff of icy javelins pierces and dismembers the vapoury masses in cluster about the circle of flame descending upon the greatest and most elevated of Admirals at the head of the Strand, with illumination of smoke-plumed chimneys, house-roofs, window-panes, weather-vanes, monument and pedimental monsters, and omnibus umbrella.  One would fair believe that they advance admireing; they are assuredly made handsome by the beams.  No longer mere concurrent atoms of the furnace of business (from coal-dust to sparks, rushing, as it were, on respiratory blasts of an enormous engine’s centripetal and centrifugal energy), their step is leisurely to meet the rosy Dinner, which is ever a see-saw with the God of Light in his fall; the mask of the noble human visage upon them is not roughened, as at midday, by those knotted hard ridges of the scrambler’s hand seen from forehead down to jaw; when indeed they have all the appearance of sour scientific productions.  And unhappily for the national portrait, in the Poem quoted, the Rajah’s Minister chose an hour between morning and meridian, or at least before an astonished luncheon had come to composure inside their persons, for drawing his Master’s attention to the quaint similarity of feature in the units of the busy antish congregates they had travelled so far to visit and to study: