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