the champagne corks, to behead us,--each
his own doomed Sahib.

No wonder Karlee was a gentleman; for the Vishnu Pooran was his
Chesterfield, and he had its precepts by heart. "A wise man," he would
say to the pert young Kitmudgars, as they bragged and wrangled, between
their hubble-bubbles, on the back stairs,--"a wise man will never
address another with the least unkindness; but will always speak gently,
and with truth, and never make public another's faults. He will never
engage in a dispute with either his superiors or his inferiors:
controversy and marriage are permitted only between equals. Nor will he
ever associate with wicked persons: half an instant is the utmost time
he should allow himself to remain in their company. A wise man, when
sitting, will not put one foot over the other, nor stretch forth his
foot in the presence of a superior; but he will sit with modesty, in the
posture styled _virasama_. Above all, he will not expectorate at the
time of eating, offering oblations, or repeating prayers, or in the
presence of any respectable person; nor will he ever cross the shadow of
a venerable man or of an idol."

For those who imagine that polygamy is a popular institution in
Hindostan, the answer of a Hill-man to a Mofussil magistrate should
suffice. "Do you keep more than one wife?" "We can hardly feed one; why
should we keep more?" In fact, the privilege of maintaining a plurality
of wives is restricted to a very few,--those only of the largest means
and smallest scruples,--except in the case of _Kooleen_ Brahmins, that
superlative aristocracy of caste which is supposed to be descended from
certain illustrious families who settled in Bengal several centuries
ago. Wealthy Hindoos of low degree eagerly aspire to the honor of mixing
their puddle blood with the quintessentially clarified fluid that
glorifies the circulatory systems of these demigods, and the result is a
very pretty and profitable branch of the Brahmin business,--_Kooleen_
marrying sometimes as many as fifty of such nut-brown maids of baser
birth, in consideration of a substantial dowry attached to each bride,
and a solemn obligation, accepted and signed by the paternal Puddle,
forever to feed at home her and her improved progeny. So the fifty
continue to roost in the old paternal coops, while Kooleen, like a
pampered Brahmapootra, struts, in pompous patronage, from one to the
other, his sense of duty satisfied when he has left a crow and a ca