Just now a _palkee-gharree_, cheapest of one-horse vehicles, with but one half-naked syce running at the pony's head, and never a footman near, passes the spanking Arabs; the plain turban of a respectable accountant in the Honorable Company's coal office at Garden Reach shows between the Venetian slats of the little window, and lo! our fine Baboo steps out of his slippers, and standing barefoot in the common dust of Cossitollah,--dust that has been churned by all the pigs'-feet that ply that promiscuous thoroughfare,-- humbly touches first the vulgar ground and then his elegant turban, murmuring a pious _Namaskarum_; for the respectable accountant in the Honorable Company's coal office is, like Mutty Loll, a Kooleen Brahmin,--only a little more so. Caste is God, and Mamoul is his prophet! At the gate-lodge of the Baboo's garden-house on the Durumtollah Road, a gray and withered hag, all crippled and leprosied, sits _durhna_. What may that be? Be patient; you shall know. When the Baboo was as yet a youth, his uncle Rajinda, the pride of the Mullicks, died of cholera, and the administration of the estate devolved upon our free-thinking Kalidas. Of course there were mortgages to foreclose, and delinquent debtors to stir up. A certain small shopkeeper of the China Bazaar was responsible to the concern for a few thousand rupees, wherewith he had been accommodated by Uncle Rajinda as a basis for certain operations in seersuckers and castor-oil, that had yielded no returns. So our Baboo, in a curt _chit_, (that is, note, or _sheet_ of paper, as near as a Bengalee can come to the word,) bade the small speculator of China Bazaar come down forthwith with the rupees. But, behold you now, "he had paid," he said. "By the Holy Ganges and the Blessed Cow! by the turban of his father and the veil of his mother! restitution had been made long ago," the old man said; "and the soul of Uncle Rajinda, the pride of the Mullicks, had no reason to be disquieted for the rupees, though the seersuckers had been but vanity, and the castor-oil vexation of spirit." "Produce the documents," said the Baboo, with a business-like impassibility that in Wall Street would have made him a great bear;-- "where are the receipts?" "My Lord, I know not. Prostrating my unworthy turban beneath the lovely lilies of your feet, I swear to my _gureeb purwar_, the destitute-and-humble-protecting lord, by the Holy Water and the Blessed Cow, by the beard of my father and the veil of my mother, that I settled the little account long ago!" That unhappy speculator in seersuckers and castor-oil died in prison, and a _gooroo_ (that is, a spiritual teacher) feed by the Baboo, desolated his last hour with the assurance that he should transmigrate into the bodies of seven generations of _gharree_-horses, and drag _feringhee_ sailormen, in a state of beer, from the ghauts to the punch-houses, all his miserable lives.