eturn visits, durbars, religious festivals, or public
ceremonials, he claims and receives preposterous fees. The Rajas,
whose dignity is always exceedingly delicate, stand in great fear of
the chuprassies. They believe that on public occasions the chuprassies
have sometimes the power of sicklying them o'er with the pale cast of
neglect.

English officers who have become de-Europeanised from long residence
among undomesticated natives, or by the habitual performance of petty
ceremonial duties of an Oriental hue, employ chuprassies to aggrandise
their importance. They always figure on a background of red
chuprassies. Such officials are what Lord Lytton calls White Baboos.

[Mr. Whitley Stokes, in his own artless way, once proposed legislating
against chuprassies, I am told. His plan was to include them among the
criminal classes, and hand them over to Major Henderson, the
Director-General of Thuggee and Dacoity; but this functionary, viewing
the matter in a different light, made some demi-official
representation to the Legal Member under the pseudonym of "Walker,"
and the subject dropped.]

A great Maharaja once told me that it was the tyranny of the
Government chuprassies that made him take to drink. He spoke of them
as "the Pindarries of modern India." He had a theory that the small
pay we gave them accounted for their evil courses. A chuprassie gets
about eight pounds sterling a year. He added that if we saw a
chuprassie on seven rupees a month living overtly at the rate of a
thousand, we ought immediately to appoint him an _attache_ or put him
in gaol.

I make a simple rule in my own establishment of dismissing a
chuprassie as soon as he begins to wax fat. A native cannot become
rich without waxing fat, because wealth is primarily enjoyed by the
mild Gentoo as a means of procuring greasy food in large quantities.
His secondary enjoyment is to sit upon it. He digs a hole in the
ground for his rupees, and broods over them, like a great obscene
fowl. If you see a native sitting very hard on the same place day
after day, you will find it worth your while to dig him up. Shares in
this are better than the Madras gold mines.

In early Company days, when the Empire was a baby, the European
writers[S] regarded with a kindly eye those profuse Orientals who went
about bearing gifts; but Lord Clive closed this branch of the
business, and it has been taken up by our scarlet runners or verandah
parasites, in our name. Now, d