Such is the Hamal in his youth, and as he grows older he gets more so. About middle life he sets hard, like plaster of Paris, his senses get obfuscated, and a shell appears to form on the outside of his intellect, so that access to his understanding becomes very difficult. Sometimes his temper also grows crabbed, and _noli me tangere_ writes itself distinctly across the mark of his god on his old brow. A _Hamal_ in this phase is the most impracticable animal in this universe. When found fault with, he never answers back, but he enters on a vigorous conversation with himself, which is like a tune on a musical box, for it must be allowed to go until it runs itself out; nothing short of smashing the instrument will stop it. How well I remember one veteran of this type, from whose colloquies with his own soul I gathered that he had been fifty-six years in gentlemen’s service, and never served any but gentlemen until he came to me. He computed his age, I think, at seventy-two, and asked leave to attend the funeral of his grandfather. Sometimes, happily, the _Hamal’s_ senility takes the direction of benevolence. Who does not know the benign, stupid old man, with his snowy whiskers and kindly smile, which seems to grow kindlier with every tooth he loses! [Picture: Ooswasty Lukree] It is a practical question whether you should endure the _Hamal_, or address yourself to the task of his reformation, and I am content to make myself singular by advocating the latter for two reasons; firstly, because he cannot be endured; secondly, because I cherish a fantastic faith in his reformability,—at least if you take him in his youth, before he has set. I believe we fail to cure him either because we do not try, or because we dismiss him before we succeed. Another great impediment to success in this enterprise is the foolish habit of getting wrathful. An untimely explosion of wrath will generally blow a sensitive Hamal’s wits quite out of his own reach, and of course, out of yours; or, if he is of the stolid sort, he will set it down as a phenomenon incidental to _sahebs_, but without any bearing on the matter in hand, and he will go on as before. Besides, a state of indignation is very detrimental to your own command of the language, and if you could in cold blood take your “Forbes” and study some of the sentences which you fulminated in your ebullitions of anger, you would cease to wonder that the subject of them was such an idiot. Hum roz roz hookum day, Tum roz roz hookum nay, Ooswasty lukree—(whack, whack)