weetmeats the man
became very angry, and bounding from his seat called his neighbours
together, and they all shouted and screamed at me, and called a man I
thought to be a soldier, though he looked more like an ape in his long
loose trousers of dirty black, and his untidy red turban, under which
cumbrous garments his thin and stunted frame seemed even blacker and
more contemptible than nature had made them. I afterwards discovered him
to be one of the Bombay police. He seized me by the arm, and I, knowing
I had done no wrong, and curious to discover, if possible, what the
trouble was, accompanied him whither he led me. After waiting many hours
in a kind of little shed where there were more policemen, I was brought
before an Englishman. Of course all attempts at explanation were
useless. I could speak not a word of anything but Arabic and Persian,
and no one present understood either. At last, when I was in despair,
trying to muster a few words of Greek I had learned in Istamboul, and
failing signally therein, an old man with a long beard looked curiously
in at the door of the crowded court. Some instinct told me to appeal to
him, and I addressed him in Arabic. To my infinite relief he replied in
that tongue, and volunteered to be interpreter. In a few moments I
learned that my crime was that I had _touched_ the sweetmeats on the
counter.

"In India, as you who have lived here doubtless know, it is a criminal
offence, punishable by fine or imprisonment, for a non-Hindu person to
defile the food of even the lowest caste man. To touch one sweetmeat in
a trayful defiles the whole baking, rendering it all unfit for the use
of any Hindu, no matter how mean. Knowing nothing of caste and its
prejudices, it was with the greatest difficulty that the _moolah_, who
was trying to help me out of my trouble, could make me comprehend
wherein my wrong-doing lay, and that the English courts, being obliged
in their own interest to uphold and protect the caste practices of the
Hindus, at the risk of another mutiny, could not make any exception in
favour of a stranger unacquainted with Indian customs. So the Englishman
who presided said he would have to inflict a fine, but being a very
young man, not yet hardened to the despotic ways of Eastern life, he
generously paid the fine himself, and gave me a rupee as a present into
the bargain. It was only two shillings, but as I had not had so much
money for months I was as grateful as though it h