d with good-natured chaff. The
road was one long avenue, and in the branches overhead the monkeys
sported and chased each other from tree to tree; birds sang, for it was
nesting-time; and the day was as happy as it was long.

At nightfall they reached the village, and the head man made them very
comfortable. The next day the wedding feast was spread, and quite two
hundred people sat down to it. After the feast there was racing,
wrestling, and dancing to amuse the guests.

They enjoyed themselves very much. The wedding feast was to last several
days, and instead of returning the following day as they had promised
the mahout, Piroo determined to stay a day longer, in spite of all that
Alec had to say against it.

Piroo was in his element, and sang and danced with great success, for
the arrack was in his veins, and at such times he could be the antipodes
of his morose self. His dancing was much applauded. But there was
Bhuggoo, the sweeper, from the city, who had a reputation for dancing,
and was in great request at weddings in consequence, and he danced
against Piroo, and so elegant and ingenious were his contortions that he
was voted the better. Then he changed his dance to one in which he
caricatured Piroo so cleverly in every turn and gesture that the people
yelled and laughed.

This so incensed Piroo that he struck the man; but the sweeper, who was
generally accustomed to winding up his performance by a grand broom
fight with some brother of the same craft, was quite ready for an affair
that could only increase his popularity. Catching up his jharroo, or
broom, he began to shower blows upon the unfortunate Piroo, yet never
ceasing to dance round him so grotesquely that the fight was too much of
a farce for any one to think of interfering. Yet the blows went home
pretty hard, and as the broom was a sort of besom made of the springy
ribs of the palm-leaf it stung sharply where it found the naked flesh.

It is a great indignity to be beaten by the broom of a sweeper, and
Piroo, maddened with rage, flew at the throat of his rival. But Bhuggoo,
the sweeper, was very nimble, and as the end of a jharroo in the face
feels like the back of a porcupine, you may guess it is the most
effective way of stopping a rush. So Piroo, baffled and humiliated, left
the sweeper victor of the field and fled amid great shouts of laughter.
But his rage had not died in him, and more arrack made him mad; else
why should he have done the foo