Early morning in the big bazaar at Faizapore. So much can be said; but who with pen alone could paint the scene, or who with brush give the aroma, physical and moral, which, to those familiar with the life of Indian streets, remains for ever the one indelible memory? The mysterious smell indescribable to those who know not the East; the air of sordid money-getting and giving which pervades even the children; the gaily-dressed, chattering stream of people drifting by; but from the grey-bearded cultivator come on a lawsuit from his village, to the sweeper, besom in hand, propelling the black flood along the gutter, the only subject sufficiently interesting to raise one voice above the universal hum, is money. Even the stalwart herdswomen with their kilted skirts swaying at each free bold step, their patchwork bodices obeying laws of decency antipodal to ours, even they, born and bred in the desert, talk noisily of the _ghee_ they are bringing to market in the russet and black jars poised on their heads; and if _ghee_ be not actually money, it is inextricably mixed up with it in the native mind. All else may fade from the memory; the glare of sunlight, the transparent shadows, the clustering flies and children round the cavernous sweetmeat-shops, the glitter of brazen pots, and the rainbow-hued overflow from the dyers' vats staining the streets like a reflection of the many-tinted cloths festooned to dry overhead. Even the sharper contrasts of the scene may be forgotten; the marriage procession swerving to give way to the quiet dead, swathed in muslins and bound with tinsel, carried high on the string bed, or awaiting sunset and burial in some narrow by-way among green-gold melons and piles of red wheat. But to those who have known an Indian bazaar well, the chink of money, and the smell of a chemist's shop, will ever remain a more potent spell to awaken memory than any elaborate pictures made by pen or pencil. On this particular morning quite a little crowd was collected round the doorway leading to the house of one Shunker Dâs, usurer, contractor, and honorary magistrate; a man who combined those three occupations into one unceasing manufacture of money. In his hands pice turned to annas, annas to rupees, and rupees in their turn to fat. For there is no little truth in the assertion that the real test of a _buniah's_ (money-lender's) wealth is his weight, and the safest guard for income-tax his girth in inches.