Regard for the Indian perusers of these pages, who know by experience how “banal” a character is the half-caste oriental Portuguese, prevents my offering anything but a sketch of Valentine A. and Gaetano B. I had hired them at Bombay for Co.’s rs. 20 per mensem, besides board and lodging. Scions of that half Pariah race which yearly issues from Goa, Daman and Diu to gather rupees as “cook boys,” dry-nurses, and “buttrels,” in wealthy British India, the hybrids had their faults: a pride of caste, and a contempt for Turks and heathen, heretics and infidels, which often brought them to grief; a fondness for acting triton amongst the minnows; a certain disregard for the seventh commandment, in the matter of cloth and clothes, medicines and provisions; a constitutional repugnance to “Signior Sooth;” a wastefulness of other men’s goods, and a peculiar tenacity of their own; a deficiency of bodily strength and constitutional vigour; a voracity which induced indigestion once a day; and, finally, a habit of frequent phlebotomy which, deferred, made them sick. They had also their merits. Valentine was a good specimen of the neat-handed and ready-witted Indian: in the shortest time he learned to talk Kisawahili sufficiently for his own purposes, and to read a chronometer and thermometer sufficiently for ours: he had, however, one blemish, an addiction to “fudging,” which rendered the severest overseeing necessary. A “Davy do a’ things,” he was as clever at sewing a coat as at cooking a curry. Gaetano had a curious kind of tenderness when acting nurse, and, wonderful to relate, an utter disregard for danger: he would return alone through a night-march of jungle to fetch his forgotten keys, and would throw himself into an excited mob of natives with a fearlessness which, contrasted with his weakly body, never failed to turn their wrath into merriment. He suffered severely from the secondaries of fever, which, in his case, as in his master’s, assumed a cerebral form. At Msene he was seized with fits resembling epilepsy; and as he seemed every month to become more addle-headed and scatter-brained, more dirty and untidy, more wasteful and forgetful, more loath to work without compulsion, and more prone to start and feed the fire with ghee when it was the scarcest of luxuries, I could not but attribute many of his delinquencies to disease.