t. A dirty dhoti girds his
loins, and upon his head is a turban of the same questionable hue which
serves both as a head-dress and as a support for his tray of cakes. If a
Musulman, he wears only a skullcap, a shirt or jacket and a pair of soiled
baggy trousers. Once he has called, the jaleibi-vendor has a habit of
presenting himself every day at the very hour when the children of the
house begin to clamour for food, and calmly defies the angry order of the
householder not to appear unless bidden.

Next comes the vendor of "chah, chah garam, chaaah garaaam" or hot tea, who
is unusually an Irani. For having introduced tea into Western Asia the
inhabitants of the land of "the gul and the bulbul" claim the secret of
making a perfect infusion of the celestial leaves. He is no longer the
embodiment of Tom Moore's Heroic Guebre, this tea-vending Irani, and his
apron forbids the suggestion that he has any association with Gao, the
subverter of a monarchy and the slayer of the tyrant Zuhhac. He has sadly
degenerated from the type of his Guebre ancestor. If he owns a shop he
combines the sale of other commodities with the tea business. He has an
ice-cream, a sherbet and a "cold-drink" department; and he touts for
customers, singing the praises of hot and cold beverages in a language
redolent of Persian. It does not pay him to use fresh tea-leaves from
Kangra or China; so he purchases his stock from small traders, who in their
turn obtain it as a bargain from butlers or stewards. The latter dry them
after one infusion by their masters and, mixing some unused leaves, make up
a fresh box and dispose of it in the markets. As for soda-water and allied
beverages, he gets his supply from the cheapest manufacturers; while his
ice-cream contains probably more water than milk and is flavoured, not with
vanilla, pine-apple or orange, but with some article which he declares is a
complete antidote against internal discomfort. He prepares his tea _a la
Russe_ in a brightly-polished samovar which compares favourably with his
tea-cups and country-made tin spoons. He charges his customer from two to
four pice for this delightful mixture which has a flavour of hot-water and
iron-rust rather than of tea.

Here too comes the itinerant fruit-seller, very often a woman, who hawks
fruit of all kinds from the superior mango to the acid "karaunda" of the
Ghats. For the sale of country-mangoes a place of vantage is required; so
she takes up a strong posi