A TIFFIN OF PARAGRAPHS.
How runs the Hindoo saw? "Are we not to milk when there is a cow?" When India is giving down generous streams of paragraphy to all the greedy buckets of the press, shall we not hold our pretty pail under? As our genial young friend, Ensign Isnob, of the "Sappies and Minors," would say,—"I believe you, me boy!"
Then come with us to Cossitollah, and we'll have a tiffin of talk; some cloves of adventure, with a capsicum or two of tragic story, shall stand for the curry; the customs of the country may represent the familiar rice; a whiff of freshness and fragrance from the Mofussil will be as the mangoes and the dorians; in the piquancy and grotesqueness of the first pure Orientalism that may come to hand we shall recognize the curious chow-chow of the chutney; and as for the beer,—why, we will be the beer ourselves.
"Kitmudgar, remove that scorpion from the punka, before it drops into the Sahib's plate.—Hold, miscreant! who told you to kill it?
Lift it with care,—
Fashioned so slenderly,
Young, 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
