ster sat at one end like a tailor on the dusty floor, and along
under the shed sat the scholars, a pack of little urchins with no other
clothes on than a skull-cap and a piece of cloth round their loins. These
little ones squatted, like their master, in the sand: they had wooden
imitations of slates in their hands, on which, having first written their
lessons with chalk, they recited them _a pleine gorge_, as the French
would say, being sure to raise their voices on the approach of any
European or native of note. Now Cawnpore is one of the most dusty places
in the world; the Sepoy lines are the most dusty part of Cawnpore; and as
the little urchins are always well greased either with cocoa-nut oil, or,
in failure thereof, with rancid mustard oil, whenever there was the
slightest breath of air they always looked as if they had been powdered
all over with brown powder. Who that has ever heard it, can forget the
sounds of the various notes with which these little people intonated
their 'Aleph, Zubbin ah, Zair a, Paiche oh,' as they moved backwards and
forwards in their recitations? Who can forget the self-importance of the
schoolmaster, who was generally a grey-bearded, dry, old man, who had no
other means of proving his superiority to the scholars than by making
more noise than even they could?"

{i:Henry Martyn's first endeavour at native preaching: p1.jpg}

In the winter of 1809, Mr. Martyn made his first endeavour at native
preaching. The Yogis and Fakers, devotees and vagrants, haunted the
station, and every Sunday evening he opened the gates of his garden,
admitted all who were collected by the assurance of the distribution of a
pice a head; and standing on his platform, read to them some simple verse
of Scripture, and then endeavoured to make them believe there is a pure
Almighty Universal Father. A frightful crowd: they were often five
hundred in number. "No dreams," says Mrs. Sherwood, "in the delirium of
a raging fever, could surpass the realities" of their appearance;
"clothed with abominable rags, or nearly without clothes, or plastered
with mud and cow-dung, or with long matted locks streaming down to their
heels; every countenance foul and frightful with evil passions; the lips
black with tobacco, or crimson with henna. One man, who came in a cart
drawn by a bullock, was so bloated as to look like an enormous frog;
another had kept an arm above his head with his hand clenched till the
nail had come ou