mountainous head-loads of bedding and other freight,
trying simultaneously to pass each other, in opposing floods, in one
narrow door. These opposing floods were patient, gentle, long-suffering
natives, with whites scattered among them at rare intervals; and wherever
a white man's native servant appeared, that native seemed to have put
aside his natural gentleness for the time and invested himself with the
white man's privilege of making a way for himself by promptly shoving all
intervening black things out of it. In these exhibitions of authority
Satan was scandalous. He was probably a Thug in one of his former
incarnations.

Inside the great station, tides upon tides of rainbow-costumed natives
swept along, this way and that, in massed and bewildering confusion,
eager, anxious, belated, distressed; and washed up to the long trains and
flowed into them with their packs and bundles, and disappeared, followed
at once by the next wash, the next wave. And here and there, in the
midst of this hurly-burly, and seemingly undisturbed by it, sat great
groups of natives on the bare stone floor,--young, slender brown women,
old, gray wrinkled women, little soft brown babies, old men, young men,
boys; all poor people, but all the females among them, both big and
little, bejeweled with cheap and showy nose-rings, toe-rings, leglets,
and armlets, these things constituting all their wealth, no doubt. These
silent crowds sat there with their humble bundles and baskets and small
household gear about them, and patiently waited--for what? A train that
was to start at some time or other during the day or night! They hadn't
timed themselves well, but that was no matter--the thing had been so
ordered from on high, therefore why worry? There was plenty of time,
hours and hours of it, and the thing that was to happen would happen
--there was no hurrying it.

The natives traveled third class, and at marvelously cheap rates. They
were packed and crammed into cars that held each about fifty; and it was
said that often a Brahmin of the highest caste was thus brought into
personal touch, and consequent defilement, with persons of the lowest
castes--no doubt a very shocking thing if a body could understand it and
properly appreciate it. Yes, a Brahmin who didn't own a rupee and
couldn't borrow one, might have to touch elbows with a rich hereditary
lord of inferior caste, inheritor of an ancient title a couple of yards
long, and he would