much less the _Dhobie_. He is not tolerable. Submit to him we must, since resistance is futile; but his craven spirit makes submission difficult and resignation impossible. If he had the soul of a conqueror, if he wasted you like Attilla, if he flung his iron into the clothes-basket and cried _Væ victis_, then a feeling of respect would soften the bitterness of the conquered; but he conceals his ravages like the white ant, and you are betrayed in the hour of need. When he comes in, limping and groaning under his stupendous bundle, and lays out _khamees_, _pyatloon_, and _pjama_, all so fair and decently folded, and delivers them by tale in a voice whose monotonous cadence seems to tell of some undercurrent of perennial sorrow in his life, who could guess what horrors his perfidious heart is privy to? Next morning, when you spring from your tub and shake out the great jail towel which is to wrap your shivering person in its warm folds, lo! it yawns from end to end. There is nothing but a border, a fringe, left. You fling on your clothes in unusual haste, for it is mail day morning. The most indispensible of them all has scarcely a remnant of a button remaining. You snatch up another which seems in better condition, and scramble into it; but, in the course of the day, a cold current of wind, penetrating where it ought not, makes you aware of what your friends behind your back have noticed for some time, _viz._, that the starch with which a gaping rent had been carefully gummed together, that you might not see it, has melted and given way. The thought of these things makes a man feel like Vesuvius on the eve of an eruption; but you must wait for relief till _Dhobie_ day next week, and then the poltroon has stayed at home, and sent his brother to report that he is suffering from a severe stomachache. When the miscreant makes his next appearance in person, he stands on one leg, with joined palms and a piteous bleat, and pleads an _alibi_. He was absent about the marriage of a relation, and his brother washed the clothes. So your lava falls back into its crater, or, I am afraid, more often overflows the surrounding country.