Atma is of these people, and the two grooms, and Dumboo, the upper housemaid, a strapping treasure six feet in his stockings. I would like it better if all our servants were, but it is impossible to conceive Sropo doing up muslin frills--at least it is impossible to conceive the frills--and I could not ask people to eat entrées sent up by any friend of Masuddi’s. I admit they do not altogether adapt themselves, or even wash themselves. I have before now locked Masuddi and the others up with a tub and a bar of kitchen soap and instructions of the most general nature, demanding, on their release, to _see the soap_. It was the only reliable evidence. Besides if I had not required to see my soap, worn by honest service, they would have sold it and bought sweetmeats and gone none the cleaner. They have many such little ways, which few people I know consider as engaging as I do. But what I like best is their lightheartedness and their touch of fancy. Sropo will go to his nuptials with a rose behind his ear--where in my barbarous West does a young man choose to approach the altar thus? and when Masuddi courted Tuktoo upon the mountain paths in the twilight I think a shy idyll went barefoot between them; though he, the male creature, would make shame of it now, preferring to speak of sticks and of obedience. They are the young of the world, these hill sons and daughters, and they still remember how the earth they are made of stirs in the spring. It is late evening in my garden now--there has seemed, somehow, no good reason to go in, though one new leaf in the borders has long been just like another--and far down the khud I hear a playing upon the flute. It is a fragmentary air but vigorous and sweet, and it brings me, dropping through the vast and purple spaces of the evening, the most charming sensation. For it is not a Secretary to the Government of India who performs, nor any member of the choir invisible that sings hosannas over there to the Commander-in-Chief, but a simple hill-man who would make a melody because it is spring, and he has perchance been given leave to go and marry himself. CHAPTER IV