By an odd concurrence of circumstances, when near Fyzabad I was for three days thrown on the hospitality of a wealthy Mohammedan. Nothing could have exceeded his kindness, but the peculiar nature of the entertainment he gave me may be conjectured when I mention that he had not such a thing as a chair, table, knife, fork or spoon to his name. Perforce, I had to dine sitting on the floor and with the sole aid of my fingers. However, I accepted my fate without a murmur, and soon learned to feed after the fashion of Eden as deftly as if I had been bred to it. Hindoo cookery I could rarely screw up my courage so heroically as to venture upon. Even the odor of my Calcutta washerman, redolent with the fragrance of castor oil, was too much for my unchastised squeamishness; and as to assafoetida, the favorite condiment of our Aryan cousins, I was so uncatholic as to bring away from India the same aversion to it that I had carried out there. But a Mohammedan has, with some unimportant reservations, highly rational notions as concerns the eatable and the drinkable. His endless variety of kabobs and pilaus is worthy of all commendation; and his sherbets, which refresh without a sting or a resipiscent headache next morning, are no doubt the style of phlegm-cutters and gum-ticklers which one had better patronize pretty exclusively while between the tropics. The gentleman of the circumcision whom I had for host was, I suspect, something of an epicure, and his cooking was such as I found eminently toothsome. My dinner was on the floor at the polite hour of eight, after which he would come to me for a short talk and to chant a little Persian poetry. At nine he was due in his harem, which, he gave me to understand, was a populous establishment.
For my special service he detailed, to my surprise, not a man, but a young woman, who, I take it, was in bonds. Under considerate Hindoo and Mohammedan masters slavery is, however, the lightest of hardships, and the damsel appropriated to wait on me, if she were not a slave, could not have been lighter-hearted. A student of all the natural products of the East, I did not neglect while there to bestow a proper share of study on Indian womankind; and as my Fyzabad abigail was a noteworthy specimen of her species, I may as well gratify the curiosity of the untraveled to know what she was like. Such as she was the queen of Sheba would perhaps have been if scoured very bright and pared shapely. Her name was Dilrubâ, which signifies, being interpreted, "Heart-ravisher." She may have been seventeen or eighteen; she was of a good height and elegantly proportioned, with a well-set neck, sloping shoulders, and fine bust; and her carriage had that stately and sylph-like grace which no words can depict, and which is found nowhere on earth but among the Orientals. Her hands and feet were exquisitely small and symmetrical. Her arms, which were bare to the shoulder, displayed everything of fullness, rotundity and lines of beauty that could be desired. Their hue and delicacy of texture would have reminded a connoisseur of brownish satin. Her waist, tight-cinctured, was—which is the highest praise—not ultra-fashionable, and the undulations of her gauzy drapery disclosed, as she receded, enough of ankle and crural adjacency to furnish hints of improvement to most classical sculptors. Her lips, I regret to say, were too liny, and not of the true ruby tint, but with the exception of her mouth all her features were, not to say more, good. As to her eyes, I should do injustice by any attempt to describe them. An object must be susceptible of calm and dispassionate contemplation if one would analyze it afterward without complete disaster. A very irresistible little piece of orientality she must indeed have been, perchance the reader will conclude. And yet, if the reader is a man and a brother—that is to say, a brother white man—I answer him he is altogether in too great a hurry. He has forgotten her color; and color is a matter which we narrow—minded dwellers in the North find it impossible to be liberal about. Not by five-and-twenty shades, at the least, did the trim creature resemble any lily of the valley but a very dark one; and of the rose she was totally unsuggestive. If I had been so cosmopolitan as to make love to her, she could not have called up a blush to save her pretty little soul and body. She might have turned green or yellow, for aught I know, but by no possibility could she have done what she ought to have done.
At Fyzabad there is but little to see, and that little is rather uninteresting. What impressed me there, more than anything else, was a particular private dwelling, and especially a certain room in it. The edifice to which I refer belonged to an opulent Mohammedan, and had been erected by an English architect. Being constructed pretty closely on the model of a mansion in Belgravia, it was wholly unsuited in a hot climate to any purpose except that of torture. In all probability, its constructor, as he roasted over his work, omitted of set intention to fit it up with fireplaces. In this omission, however, there was a breach of contract, for in all its details the building was to be thoroughly English. The defect was pointed out at the last moment, and strict injunctions were given to repair it. Fireplaces there must be, and a full complement of them. The matter was finally compromised by providing a single small square room at the top of the house with one in each of its side walls. In the same spirit of determination not to come short of the mark, a rich Bengalee baboo whom I once knew furnished his drawing-room, a large apartment, with thirty-two round tables and an equal number of musical boxes.
A great deal more might be said of Oude as I saw it, but the region, since it became English territory, has been so often and so fully described that I forbear to dwell on it. At Lucknow, its capital, I spent a week as guest of Sir Henry Sleeman, with whom, from that time to the end of his life, I was in constant correspondence. That Sir Henry was a man altogether out of the common must be evident from his various publications. I came to know his mind on most subjects very intimately. In every respect he was original and peculiar, and but for a rooted aversion to anything like Boswellism I might here depict a character such as one seldom meets with in these days. To his personal influence it was largely owing that for many a long year the annexation of Oude to the Indian empire was suspended in disastrous balance.
FITZEDWARD HALL.
[ONCE AND AGAIN.]
Once and again I have nestled in the lap of a small village and wondered at the necessity of any world beyond my peaceful horizon. Once and again, after long years, I have entered the old school-room with the fearful and impatient heart of a boy: I have paced the play-ground and gone to and fro in the village streets singing, but the song I once sang came not again to my lips, for it no longer suited the time or the occasion.
I thought to take up the thread of life where I had dropped it near a score of years before, and complete the web which fancy had embroidered with many a flower of memory and hope and love. I had forgotten that the loom weaves steadily and persistently whether my hand be on it or not, and that I can never mend the rent in the fabric I so long neglected.
My record elsewhere is replete with numerous accidents by flood and field—with the epochs of meetings and marryings, of births and deaths. Meanwhile, the friends who had held fast to me through all these changes wrote ever in the selfsame vein, and plotted for my return with such even and sturdy faith that I had grown to look upon them as having drunk at the fountain of immortal youth.
Of course the delectable spring gushed out of the heart of one of those dear old hills that walled in the village, for how else could they have quaffed it? The bones of more than two centuries pave the highway between New England and California. As jubilant as young Lochinvar, I came out of the West one summer dawn, and took train for Heartsease. I had resolved to compass in a single week the innumerable landmarks that dot mountain and desert and prairie—to leap as it were from sea to sea, from the present to the past, from manhood to early youth.