y good and plenty. The bread is
usually bad, and everybody calls for toast. The deserts are usually
quite good.

It takes a stranger some time to become accustomed to barefooted
servants, but few of the natives in India of whatever class wear
shoes. Rich people, business men, merchants, bankers and others
who come in contact on equal terms with the foreign population
usually wear them in the streets, but kick them off and go around
barefooted as soon as they reach their own offices or their homes.
Although a servant may be dressed in elaborate livery, he never
wears shoes. The butlers, footmen, ushers and other servants
at the government house in Calcutta, at the viceregal lodge at
Simla, at the palace of the governor of Bombay, and the residences
of the other high officials, are all barefooted.

Everybody with experience agrees that well-trained Hindu servants
are quick, attentive and respectful and ingenious. F. Marion
Crawford in "Mr. Isaacs" says: "It has always been a mystery
to me how native servants manage always to turn up at the right
moment. You say to your man, 'Go there and wait for me,' and you
arrive and find him waiting; though how he transferred himself
thither, with his queer-looking bundle, and his lota and cooking
utensils and your best teapot wrapped up in a newspaper and ready
for use, and with all the hundred and one things that a native
servant contrives to carry about without breaking or losing one of
them, is an unsolved puzzle. Yet there he is, clean and grinning
as ever, and if he were not clean and grinning and provided with
tea and cheroots, you would not keep him in your service a day,
though you would be incapable of looking half so spotless and
pleased under the same circumstances yourself."

Every upper servant in an Indian household has to have an under
servant to assist him. A butler will not wash dishes or dust or
sweep. He will go to market and wait on the table, but nothing
more. A cook must have a coolie to wash the kitchen utensils,
and wait on him. He will do nothing but prepare the food for
the table. A coachman will do nothing but drive. He must have
a coolie to take care of the horse, and if there are two horses
the owner must hire another stable man, for no Hindu hostler
can take care of more than one, at least he is not willing to
do so. An American friend has told me of his experience trying
to break down one of the customs of the East, and compelling
one native to gr