Sitting solemnly on the breast of the dead boy, the "grim, ungainly, gaunt, and ominous bird" peers with sidelong glance into his face, gloating; and then—
Immediately my Parsee neighbor uprises in his place, throws aside his veil, and, shouting, runs forward. The Pondicherry eagle soars screaming to the clouds, and the sorrow-stricken Gheber bends over the dear corpse. Is it Heaven or Hell? the right eye or the left? Alas, the left!
He beats his breast, he falls upon his knees, and cries with frantic gestures to the setting Sun; but the sullen god only draws a cloud before his face, and leaves his poor worshipper to despair. Then my Parsee neighbor arises and girds up his loins, muffles his haggard face more closely than before, and with dishevelled beard, and chin sadly sunk upon his breast, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left, and meeting no man's gaze, wends silently homeward.
To-morrow he will take his wife and go to Bombay, to feed with consecrated sandal-wood and oil the Sacred Flame the Magi brought from Persia, when they were driven thence with all their people to Ormuz. But the name of little Kirsajee will cross their lips no more; his memory is a forbidden thing in the household; he is as if he never had been.
When Brahminee kite, and adjutant, and white-breasted crow have done their ghoulish office on little Kirsajee, his bones shall lie bleaching under the pitiless eye of his people's blazing god, till the rains come, and fill the pit, and carry the waste of Gheber skeletons by subterraneous sewers down to the sea. But the Pondicherry eagle took the left eye first; wherefore the most pious deeds of merit, to be performed by my Parsee neighbor,—even a hospital for maimed dogs, or feeding the Sacred Flame with great store of sandal-wood and precious gums, or tilling the earth with a diligence equivalent to the efficacy of ten thousand prayers,—can hardly suffice to save the soul of little Kirsajee, the Forbidden!
* * * * *
There is a blood-feud of three months' standing between two members of our household.
One day, Lootee, the chuprassey's cat, took Tchoop, the khansamah's monkey, unawares, as he was sunning himself on the house-top, and with scratching and spitting, sudden and furious, so startled him, that he threw himself over the parapet into the crowded Cossitollah, and would have been killed by the fall, had he not chanced to alight on the voluminous turban of a dandy hurkaru from the Mint. As it was, one of his arms sustained a compound fracture, and his nerves suffered so frightful a shock, that it was only by a miracle of surgery, and the most patient nursing, that he was ever restored to his wonted agility and sagacity.
But the day of retribution has arrived; Lootee has had kittens. There were five of them in the original litter; but only one remains. Tchoop tossed two of them from the house-top when no dandy hurkaru from the Mint was below to soften the fall; the old adjutant-bird, that for three years has stood on one leg on the Parsee's godown, gobbled up another as it lay choked in the south veranda; while the dismayed sirdar found the head of a fourth jammed inextricably in the neck of his sacred lotah, wherewith he performs his pious ablutions every morning at the ghaut.
On the other hand, Lootee has made prize of about three inches of Tehoop's tail, and displays it all over the house for a trophy.—It is a blood-feud, fierce and implacable as any between Afghans, and there's no knowing where it will all end.