At the end of a long aisle of palms and banians you see a bit of wide-spreading
veranda, and the full-open doors of a cool, black interior. Acres of closely
shaven lawns, dotted with flowering shrubs of the brightest reds, deepest
purples, and fieriest solferinos, beds of rich-hued foliage plants, and cool, green
masses of ferns meet your eye.
Perhaps you spy the inevitable tennis-court, swarming with players, and
bordered with tables covered with tea and sweets. Red-turbaned Malay kebuns,
or gardeners, are chasing the balls, and scrupulously clean Chinese “boys” are
passing silently among the guests with trays of eatables.
Dozens of gharries dodge past. Hundreds of rickshaws pull out of the way.
A great landau, drawn by a pair of thoroughbred Australian horses, driven by a
Malay syce, and footman in full livery, and containing a bare-headed Chinese
merchant, in the simple flowing garments of his nation, dashes along. The
victoria and the dog-cart of the European, and the universal palanquin of the
Anglo-Indian, form a perfect maze of wheels.
Suddenly the road is filled with a long line of bullock-carts. You swing your
little pony sharply to one side, barely escaping the big wooden hub of the first
cart. The syce springs down from behind, and belabors the native bullock driver,
who, paying no attention to the blows rained upon his naked back, belabors his
beasts in turn, calling down upon their ungainly humps the curses of his religion.
The scene is so familiar that only a “globe-trotter” would notice it. Yet to me
there is nothing more truly artistic, or more typically Indian in India, than a long
line of these bullock-carts, laden with the products of the tropics,—pineapples,
bananas, gambier, coffee,—urged on by a straight, graceful driver, winding
slowly along a palm and banian shaded road. We would meet such processions
at every turning, but never without recalling glorious childish pictures of the
Holy Land and Bible scenery as we painted them, while our father read of a
Sunday morning out of the old “Domestic Bible,”—we children pronounce it
“Dom-i-stick,”—how the Lord said unto Moses, “Go take twenty fat bullocks
and offer them as a sacrifice.” As we would see these “twenty fat bullocks” time
and again, I confess, with a feeling of reluctance, that some of the gilt and rose
tint was rubbed from our childish pictures, and that a realistic artist drawing
from the life before him would not deck out the patient subject in quite our
extravagant colors.