Specimen of his early writings in Scinde.
"Some years ago, when surveying the country about this Hoosree, I had an opportunity of reading a lecture to a gentleman about your age, Sir: hear how politely he received it, without ever using the word 'dogmatical,' or making the slightest allusion to 'forwardness.'
"I was superintending the shampooing[1] of a fighting cock—about as dunghill and 'low-caste' a bird as ever used a spur, but a strong spiteful thing, a sharp riser, and a clean hitter withal. Bhujang,[2] the 'dragon,' had sent many a brother biped to the soup-pot. Ere the operation of rubbing him down ended, in walked an old Moslem gentleman, who had called in a friendly unceremonious way to look at and chat with the stranger.
"Cocking, you must know, Mr. Bull, is not amongst these people the 'low' diversion your good lady has been pleased to make it. Here a man may still fight his own bird and beat his own donkey à discrétion, without incurring the persecutions of a Philo-beast Society.
"There was a humorous twinkle in the Senior's sly eye as it fell upon the form of Bhujang, and the look gained intensity when, turning towards me, the scrutinizer salaamed and politely ejaculated—
"'Máshálláh! that is a bird!—the Hyderabad breed,[3] or the Afghan?'
"I shuffled off the necessity of romancing about my dunghill's origin, and merely replied that, struck by his many beauties, I had bought him of some unknown person—I did not add for eightpence.
"'What Allah pleases!—it is a miraculous animal! You must have paid his weight in silver! Two hundred rupees, or three hundred?'[4]
"Many people are apt to show impatience or irritability when being 'made fools of'—whereby, methinks, they lose much fun and show more folly than they imagine. My answer to the old gentleman's remark was calculated to persuade that most impertinently polite personage that the Frank, with all his Persian and Arabic, was a 'jolly green.'
"Thereupon, with the utmost suavity he proceeded to inform me that he also was a fighter of cocks, and that he had some—of course immeasurably inferior to the splendid animal being shampooed there—which perhaps might satisfy even my fastidious taste. He concluded with offering to fight one under the certainty of losing it,[5] but anything for a little sport; again gauged me with his cunning glance, salaamed, and took his leave.