It was an awful thing to lower oneself to the level of a Colonel of the Madras Army, and come down to being tended by a Ramasawmy; but beggars cannot be choosers. I pointed out to him that the tooth-comb trade was a thing lightly to be dropped and taken up. He might injure his health by a washing, but he could not much hurt his prospects by coming along with me and trying his hand at bearer's work. "Could he work?" Oh, yes, he didn't mind work. He had been a servant in his time. Several servants, in fact. "Could he wash himself?" "Ye-es," he might do that if I gave him a coat--a thick coat--afterwards, and especially took care of the tooth-combs, for they were his little all. "Had he any character of any kind?" He thought for a minute and then said cheerfully: "Not a little dam." Thereat I loved him, because a man who can speak the truth in minor matters may be trusted with important things, such as shirts. We went home together till we struck a public bath, mercifully divided into three classes. I got him to go into the third without much difficulty. When he came out he was in the way of cleanliness, and before he had time to expostulate I ran him into the second. Into the first he would not go till I had bought him a cheap ulster. He came out almost clean. That cost me three shillings altogether. The ulster was half a sovereign, and some other clothes were thirty shillings. Even these things could not hide from me that he looked an unusually villainous creature. At the chambers the trouble began. The people in charge had race prejudices very strongly, and I had to point out that he was a civilised native Christian anxious to improve his English--it was fluent but unchastened--before they would give him some sort of a crib to lie down in. The housemaids called him the Camel. I introduced him as "the Tamil," but they knew nothing of the ethnological sub-divisions of India. They called him "that there beastly camel," and I saw by the light in his eye he understood only too well. Coming up the staircase he confided to me his views about the housemaids. He had lived at the docks too long. I said they weren't. He said they were. Then I showed him his duties, and he stood long in thought before the wardrobe. He evidently knew more than a little of the work, but whenever he came to a more than unusually dilapidated garment, he said: "No good for you, _I_ take"; and he took. Then he put all the buttons on in the smoking of a pipe, and asked if there was anything else. I weakly said "No." He said: "Good-bye," and faded out of the house. The housekeeper of the chambers said he would never return.