"India," by Sir Thomas Holdich, I read that out of the
population of 287,000,000 the Parsis do not number even one-tenth of a
million. It seems to me that we have the Parsi woman's type at home in
some of our old families, as we have remains of their Zoroastrian
fire-worship. I've seen one or two really beautiful and highly cultured,
but the average is just a little high-shouldered and floppy, and their
noses answer too closely to Gainsborough's description of Mrs Siddons'.
Mrs Siddons is just the Parsi type glorified.

We went to the ladies gymkana to-day more for the sake of the drive, I
think, than for anything else--with the utmost deference to ladies, they
can be seen at home--a few people played Badminton by lamplight; it was
dusky, damp, and warm, and heavy matting hung round the courts. Outside
an orange sunset shone through palm stems, and flying foxes as big as
fox terriers passed moth-like within arms length. From the height we
were on we looked down over the Back Bay, and far below in the twilight
we could make out the lights from a few boats on the sand, and
fishermen's lamps flickered across the mud flats, and from far out in
the west a light kept flashing from an island that was the haunt of
pirates the other day. Two more lights we saw were glowing to the
south-east in Bombay itself--one, the light of the native fair, and a
slight glow from the remains of the Bombay and Baroda Railway Offices, a
great domed building that burned up last night after the illuminations.
It was madness to cover public buildings with open oil lamps and leave
them to be looked after by natives--this huge Taj hotel, dry as tinder
outside, a complexity of dry wooden jalousies and balconies, was covered
with these lights and floating flags--how it didn't go off like a squib
was a miracle. I saw one flag gently float into a lamp, burn up and fall
in flaming shreds and no one was the wiser or the worse. The faintest
breath of air one way or the other and the other flags would have caught
fire, and in a second it would have run everywhere.

... After the Ladies Club, pegs and billiards inside the Yacht Club, the
Bombay ladies outside on the green lawn at tea, gossip, hats, local
affairs, and Imperialism, and beyond them the ships of the fleet picked
out with electric lights along the lines of their hulls and up masts and
funnels like children's slate drawings.

It was interesting to come from the street and the crowds of Parsis and