ng, and so fair!'

"For know, O Kitmudgar, that there is one beauty of women, and another
beauty of scorpions; and if the beauty of scorpions be to thee as the
ugliness of women, the fault is in thy godless eye.

"'Only a crawling kafir,' sayest thou, O heathen! and straightway goest
about to stick a fork into a political symbol? Verily, the hapless
wretch shall be sacrificed unto Agnee, god of Fire, that a timely
warning may enter into thy purblind soul!

"Here, take this bottle of brandy,--'_Sahib_ brandy,' you
perceive,--genuine old 'London Dock,'--and pour a cordon of ardent
spirits on the table, to 'weave a circle round him thrice.' So! that's
for British Ascendency!

"Now drop your subjugated brother into the midst thereof. See how, in
his senseless, drunken rage, he wriggles and squirms,--then desperately
dashes, and venomously snaps! That's Indian Revolt!

"Quickly, now! light the train; so!--What think you of Anglo-Saxon
power and hereditary pride?

"Oho, my Kitmudgar! you begin to understand!--the living fable is not
lost on you!

"But watch your Great Mogul! Barrackpore, Meerut, Cawnpore, Lucknow,
Delhi,--five imposing plunges, but impotent; for at every point
the Sahib's fatal fire, fire, fire, fire, fire!--insurmountable,
all-subduing 'destiny'!

"Maimed, discomfited, dismayed, shivering, at wits' end, a crippled
wriggler, in the midst of the exulting flames,--there lies your Great
Mogul!

"But see!--the scorpion, brave wretch! with a gladiator's fortitude,
loosens the shameful coil in which its last agonies have twisted it,
fiercely erects its head once more, lashes defiantly with its tail, and
then--_click! click! click!--_stings itself to death.

"And with that ends our figure of speech; for only the pitifulness of
the defeat is the Great Mogul's; the sublimity of suicide is proper to
the scorpion alone.

"Take away the fable, Kitmudgar!"

I lay in bed this morning half an hour after the sun had risen, watching
my Parsee neighbor on his house-top, and thereby lost my drive on the
Esplanade. But I console myself with imagining that the pretty Chee-chee
spinster who comes every morning from Raneemoody Gully in a green
tonjon, and makes romantic eyes at me through the silk curtains, missed
the Boston gentleman with the gray moustache, and was lonesome.

My Parsee neighbor is quite as fat, but by no means as saucy, as ever.
Last week his youngest boy died,--little Kirsajee Samsajee Bonnarjee