even to help at a
funeral; his priest, his barber, and his washerman would have shunned
him. Again, our bearer, who is himself an outcast in the eyes of the
Brahmins, will not take a letter from the hands of our Dom chiprassi
or messenger boy. Instead, the messenger boy drops the letter on the
floor, and the bearer picks it up and thus escapes the pollution that
would come from actual contact with the chiprassi." Moreover, there
are social gradations even among the Doms. One Dom proudly confided to
this lady that he was a sort of superior being because the business of
his family was to collect the bones of dead animals, a more
respectable work than that in which some other Doms engaged!

Similarly, Mrs. Lee of the Memorial Mission in Calcutta {231} tells
how one day when a dead cat had to be moved from her yard her sweeper
proudly pulled himself up and assured her that, though the lowest
among all servants, he was still too high to touch the body of a dead
animal!

My mention of the Doms as the thief caste of Benares makes this a
suitable place to say that I was surprised to find evidences of a
well-recognized hereditary robber class in not a few places in India.
The Thugs, or professional murderers, have at last been exterminated,
but the English Government has not yet been able to end the activities
of those who regard the plunder of the public as their immemorial
right. In Delhi a friend of mine told me that the watchmen are known
to be of the robber class. "You hire one of them to watch your house
at night, and nothing happens to you. I noticed once or twice that
mine was not at his post as he should have been, but had left his
shoes and stick. He assured me that this was protection enough, as the
robbers would see that I had paid the proper blackmail by hiring one
of their number as chowkidar."

In Madura, in southern India, I found the robber element carrying
things with a much higher hand. "There's where they live," Dr. J. P.
Jones, the well-known writer on Indian affairs, said to me as we were
coming home one nightfall, "and the people of Madura pay them a
tribute amounting to thousands of rupees a year. They have a god of
their own whom they always consult before making a raid. If he
signifies his approval of a robbery, it is made; otherwise,
not--though it is said that the men have a way of tampering with the
verdict so as to make the god favor the enterprise in the great
majority of cases."

India's mo