Page:Letters from India Vol 1.djvu/121

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LETTERS FROM INDIA.
113

only one thing, and does it thoroughly and exactly to a minute. They have cleared up one doubt I have always tacitly felt; I had an idea, from the noise English servants make, that their feet creaked as well as their shoes—that it was part of a servant’s privilege to have creaking feet, but it is not so. These men have no shoes and stockings, and their feet are quite silent. We had a dinner of forty-four people.

Tuesday, March 22.

Quantities of visitors till one o’clock. Mrs. Robertson went with us to see Mrs. Wilson’s Native Orphan School. It was a pretty sight, and it is impossible to look at Mrs. Wilson, in her widow’s dress, with her plain, intelligent countenance, without the greatest respect. She has collected 160 of these children; many of them lost their parents in the famine some years ago; many are deserted children. She showed us one little fat lump, about five years old, that was picked up at three-months old, just as two dogs had begun to eat it; the mother was starving, and had exposed it on the river side. She brings the children up as Christians, and marries them to native Christians when they are

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