Gopal, the _Gowlee_, haunts me in my dreams, complaining that he has been left out in the cold. I had classed him with the _borah_ and the baker, as outsiders with whom I had merely business relations; but Gopal seems to urge that he is not on the same footing with these. How can he be compared to a mercenary _borah_? Has he not ministered to my wants, morning and evening, in wet weather and dry? Have not my children grown up on his milk? He will not deny that they have eaten the baker’s bread too; but who is the baker? Does he come into the _saheb’s_ presence in person as Gopal does? No. He sits in his shop and sends a servant. Not so Gopal. He is one of my children, and I am his father and mother. And I am forced to admit there is some truth in this view of the case. The ill-favoured man who haunts my house of a morning, with a large basket of loaves poised slantwise on his head, and converses in a strange nasal brogue with the cook, is not Mr. de Souza, “baker of superior first and second sort bread, and manufacturer of every kind of biscuit, cake,” &c., but a mere underling. My intercourse with the head of the firm is confined to the first day of each month, when he waits on me in person, dressed in a smart black jacket, and presents his bill. Also on Good Friday he sends me a cake and his compliments, but the former, if it is not intercepted by the butler and applied to his own uses, is generally too unctuous for my taste. Very different are our relations with the _Doodwallah_. Our _chota hazree_ waits for him in the morning; our afternoon tea cannot proceed till he comes; the baby cries if the _Doodwallah_ is late. And even if you are one of the few who strike for independence and keep their own cow, I still counsel you to maintain amicable relations with the _Doodwallah_. One day the cow will kick and refuse to be milked, and the butler will come to you with a troubled countenance. It is a grave case and demands professional skill. The _Doodwallah_ must be sent for to milk the cow. In many other ways, too, we are made to feel our dependence on him. I believe we rarely die of cholera, or typhoid fever, without his unobtrusive assistance. And all his services are performed in person, not through any underling. That stately man who walks up the garden path morning and evening, erect as a betel-nut palm, with a tiara of graduated milk-pots on his head, and driving a snorting buffalo before him, is Gopal himself. Scarcely any other figure in the compound impresses me in the same way as his. It is altogether Eastern in its simple dignity, and symbolically it is eloquent. The buffalo represents absolute milk and the lessening pyramid of brass _lotas_, from the great two-gallon vessel at the base to the ¼-seer measure at the top, stand for successive degrees of dilution with that pure element which runs in the roadside ditches after rain. Thus his insignia interpret themselves to me. Gopal does not acknowledge my