"In one part of our ride we passed the place where the _dhobies_, or washermen, perform their work. As we saw them, we understood how it is our clothes get so sadly knocked to pieces in this part of the world. They make your shirts up into a sort of club, and then pound with it on a rock till the linen is clean. No boiling and no rubbing; nothing but pounding and rinsing, and sometimes they help things along by folding some gravel in with the linen. We have had lots of handkerchiefs sent home with holes in the centre where they had been torn through by the gravel inside, and many of our socks have been burst open at the toes and ruined before being washed a third time. Half a dozen visits to the dhoby generally make the end of a shirt or other under-garment, and sometimes they will manage to finish it in three or four. "The necessity for frequent change of linen, and the destructive manner of washing, makes the single item of under-linen a very costly one. Shirts should be made of the strongest material consistent with comfort, and not of the fine linen which most Americans are fond of. If you know anybody who is about starting on a journey around the world by way of India, tell him to get a dozen of the strongest white shirts he can before starting--or, if he does not bring them, he should have them made up in Yokohama or Hong-Kong. "Madras covers an enormous extent of ground, for the reason that all the houses stand in large yards, or 'compounds,' as they call them here. Everybody has a whole army of servants to run his house, and these servants must be cared for; and they generally manage to have their families lodged somewhere on the premises, though the master is not supposed to know it. We met a gentleman to-day who is a bachelor, and lives with another bachelor, and he said that together they had fifteen servants. Another gentleman, with his wife and two children, said he had twenty-six servants in all, and at times he employed as many as thirty. We would write about this matter in detail, but Doctor Bronson suggests that we had best wait till we have seen more of East Indian life, and had a practical experience of existence in a land of castes and curious customs; so we'll put it off for a while. [Illustration: A MADRAS BUNGALOW.] "A house where people live in India is called a bungalow, and a warehouse is named a godown. Bungalow is a Hindostanee word, and godown is a corruption of the Malay _gadong_, which means a warehouse. All through India these words are very generally used by Europeans, to the exclusion of the English names for the same things. Properly speaking, a bungalow is a house only one story high, and, owing to the great exertion required for climbing stairs in these hot countries, you rarely see a building of more than one story except in the cities.