Well, here we are! You didn't just expect to see grass huts under palm trees as a suburb of the great city of Bombay, did you? And there are the children gathered around the door of the schoolhouse waiting for us. Aren't they beauties? Hadn't you better take a picture of them to show to your boy at home? Their dress isn't exactly American in style, that is true; but it is comfortable, if it is rather exaggerated in abbreviation.
Salaam, boys! Salaam! Salaam!
VIII
The Way to Happiness
With a shrill whistle and a clanging of her engine bell, the train for Calcutta pulled into the station at M——. "Coolie, coolie!" with a decided accent on the second syllable, came the well-known call as scantily-clothed men, falling in beside the train, ran from the end of the platform to the station entrance, with hands upon the first and second-class carriage doors, lest other coolies might get the jobs of carrying the heavy trunks and earn the anna or two anna bits that they might have had.
With a cloth about the loins for decency's sake and a turban on the head as a pad for heavy boxes, otherwise naked, the brown coolie took possession of the upper class compartments and in a minute or so scores of them were filing away through the station with heads laden with trunks, boxes, hat-boxes, rolls of bedding, lunch-baskets, baskets of fruit, and every conceivable sort of parcel that an Anglo-Indian or a tourist carries with him in the compartment of an Indian train; for, although luggage vans are run on these trains, the charge for excess luggage is so great that people crowd as much under the seats, on the seats, and over the seats as possible. As an individual rarely travels with less than ten parcels the platform swarmed with carriers.
While the first and second class passengers in topis and linen suits were thus being taken out of their carriages and a fresh lot, also in topis and linen, were being put in, in no undue haste, for all Indian trains stop fifteen minutes everywhere; while that end of the platform, therefore, was in comparative calm, the other end where the third-class carriages stood was in an uproar.
Railroad travel is cheaper nowhere in the world than in India. The traveller can ride in a compartment for twelve persons by day, six by night, on leather cushions, with toilet conveniences including even a shower bath at close hand, for the matter of one cent a mile; or he can pay about two cents a mile and ride on cushions a little softer, with a trifle more floor space for stacking his bird-cages and bandboxes and with furnishings a little glossier—first class; or he can have a ride for almost nothing, if he will be content to herd with the natives in a coach with wooden seats, a coach that accommodates from twenty to fifty, the number depending on the packing.