the rod, time and again. There was nothing distinctive in Baboo’s features or
form. To the casual observer he might have been any one of a half-dozen of his
playmates. Like them, he went about perfectly naked, his soft, brown skin
shining like polished rosewood in the fierce Malayan sun.
His hair was black, straight, and short, and his eyes as black as coals. Like his
companions, he stood as straight as an arrow, and could carry a pail of water on
his head without spilling a drop.
He, too, ate rice three times a day. It puffed him up like a little old man, which
added to his grotesqueness and gave him a certain air of dignity that went well
with his features when they were in repose. Around his waist he wore a silver
chain with a silver heart suspended from it. Its purpose was to keep off the evil
spirits.
There was always an atmosphere of sandalwood and Arab essence about Baboo
that reminded me of the holds of the old sailing-ships that used to come into
Boston harbor from the Indies. I think his mother must have rubbed the perfumes
into his hair as the one way of declaring to the world her affection for him. She
could not give him clothes, or ornaments, or toys: such was not the fashion of
Baboo’s race. Neither was he old enough to wear the silk sarong that his Aunt
Fatima had woven for him on her loom.
Baboo had been well trained, and however lordly he might be in the quarters, he
was marked in his respect to the mistress. He would touch his forehead to the red
earth when I drove away of a morning to the office; though the next moment I
might catch him blowing a tiny ball of clay from his sumpitan into the ear of his
father, the syce, as he stood majestically on the step behind me.
Baboo went to school for two hours every day to a fat old Arab penager, or
teacher, whose schoolroom was an open stall, and whose only furniture a bench,
on which he sat cross-legged, and flourished a whip in one hand and a chapter of
the Koran in the other.
There were a dozen little fellows in the school; all naked. They stood up in line,
and in a soft musical treble chanted in chorus the glorious promises of the
Koran, even while their eyes wandered from the dusky corner where a cheko
lizard was struggling with an atlas moth, to the frantic gesticulations of a naked