more primitive than those of any American emigrant car, and when the train began its deliberate progress, we found that the body of the car swung so low, so nearly rested on the trucks, that we were jolted and shaken and deafened, as if in a coal-car, and covered with the dust of the road-bed. Nothing different or better was found, save once, in any part of India, When night came, a feeble oil-lamp was introduced through the roof, that made it possible to distinguish outlines and large objects, but not to read.
The train jogged along northward through a flat, cultivated country, with aloe and thorn hedges inclosing the tracks. After the rank greenness of Ceylon, these dusty fields of the dry season seemed poor and sterile. The train halted near mud villages, and the station platforms were covered with lean and leisurely black folks in red and white cotton draperies, standing at ease, their foreheads so dotted and striped with red, white, and ocher caste-marks, those ciphers, crests, and hall-marks of their creed, that they looked like so many painted red Indians of our West on the war-path. There was the usual station bedlam when the train drew up in darkness at Madura, and we followed a Tamil leader out to blacker darkness across the tracks to the dak bangla. The coolie who carried the bearer's tin trunk on his head stumbled over tree roots and finally struck a branch overhead. There was a crash, a bang, and a wreck of Tamil property, and then a flood of Tamil language, as David, our venerable traveling servant, poured out his wrath on the whining offender, who had been bruised and dented a little himself.
