s' children,
sturdiest and toughest of Anglo-Indian urchins,--affording, in their
brown cheeks and crisp muscles and boisterous ways, a consoling contrast
to the oh-call-it-pale-not-fairness, and the frailness, and premature
pensiveness of the little Civil Service.

And there is the half-caste child, the lisping chee-chee, or Eurasian,
grandiloquently so called, much given to sentimental minstrelsy,
juvenile polkas, early coquetry, and early beer, hot curries, loud
clothes, bad English, and fast pertness. I never think of them without
recalling a precocious ballad-screamer of eight years who was flourished
indispensably at every chee-chee hop in Chandernagore:

"O lay me in a little pit,
With a marvle thtone to cover it,
And keearve thereon a turkle-dove,
That the world may know I died for love!"

I left India in consequence of that child.

But for the true Anglo-Indian type of brat, at all points a complete
"torn-down," "dislikeable and rod-worthy," as Mrs. Mackenzie describes
it, there is nothing among nursery nuisances comparable to the
Civil-Service child of eight or ten years, whose father, a "Company's
Bad Bargain," in the Mint, or the Supreme Court, or the Marine Office,
draws _per mensem_ enough to set his brat up in the usual servile
surroundings of such small despots. Deriving the only education it ever
gets directly from its personal attendants, this young monster of bad
temper, bad manners, and bad language becomes precociously proficient in
overbearing ways, and voluble in Hindostanee Billingsgate, before it has
acquired enough of its ancestral tongue to frame the simplest sentence.
It bullies its _bhearer_; it bangs distractingly on the tom-tom; it
surfeits itself to an apoplectic point with pish-pash; it burns its
mouth with hot curry, and bawls; it indulges in horrid Hindostanee
songs, whereof the burden will not bear translation; it insults whatever
is most sacred to the caste attachments of its attendants; the Moab of
ayahs is its wash-pot, over an Edom of bhearers will it cast out its
shoe; it slaps the mouth of a gray-haired _khansaman_ with its slipper,
and dips its poodle's paws in a Mohammedan _kitmudgar's_ rice; it
calls a learned Pundit an _asal ulu_, an egregious owl; it says to
a high-caste _circar_, "Shut up, you pig!" and to an illustrious
_moonshee_, "_Hi, toom junglee-wallah!_" Whereat its fond mamma, to whom
Bengalee, Hindostanee, and Sanscrit are alike sealed books of Babel,