Here would be a wayside shrine, a simple stuccoed portico with columns streaked in red, enclosing the sacred emblems with their offerings of golden marigold, and bearing upon each corner, carved in dark grey stone, Siva's recumbent bull. Here millet fields, with hedges of blue aloe or euphorbias like seven-branched candlesticks, announced a place of habitation; soon the village itself appeared, a long irregular line of white-walled houses roofed with thatch or tile, and here and there greater dwellings with carved balconies and barred verandahs, behind which impassive white-robed figures sat and seemed to ponder upon life. On the right, perhaps, would be a shop all open to the road, where, cross-legged upon a kind of dais, the merchant sat among his piled wares, unenterprising and unsolicitous, serenely confident in the balance-sheet of fate. On the left, in a shady corner, a barber would be bending over a half-shaven skull. Everywhere children of every shade from yellow to deep umber would be playing solemnly about the ways, turning upon the passing stranger their grave, unfathomable eyes. Beyond the village there would be a rest-house maintained for the use of wayfaring white men, and here we would repose through the heat of the day, reclining with a book in rooms shaded with shutters, or with fine mats drenched from hour to hour with cooling sprays of water. Then with the sun's decline we would set out once more, meeting a file of blue-robed women erect as caryatides as they came up from the well, each bearing upon her back-thrown head a water-jar of earthen or brazen ware, staying her burden with a shapely brown arm circled with bangles of glass and silver. In the short hours before the darkness, we would encounter all the types of men which go to make up Indian country life--the red-slippered banker jogging on his pony beneath a white umbrella, the vendor of palm-wine urging a donkey almost lost beneath the swollen skins, barefooted ryots with silent feet and strident tongues, crowds of boys and children driving buffaloes and cows, all coming homeward from their labour with the evening.