Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/137

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WINTER INDIA
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ter should send our large trunks into the compartment, too, and give us back the sixteen rupees we had paid for extra luggage, or else the memsahib's trunks should go. They went; and she paid six rupees through the window with wrath and threats. Only the thinnest veneer of civilization prevented her from laying violent hands upon us then, or strangling us in the night. Nothing so shocks and offends the Anglo-Indian traveler on American transcontinental trains as the publicity of the Pullman cars, where each berth has its curtain and number, and is as securely reserved as a theater chair. May they always occupy four-berthed, uncurtained carriages with infuriated strangers who have stolen their lower berths and owe them a grudge besides!