At four separate points of the native city the Government had set up stations where all comers might be inoculated free—not only free, but with that sixpenny reward. In the midst of the central market-place, where elderly bangle-merchants, with the help of soapy powder, were squeezing gorgeous glass bangles from China over women’s hands, and men and women were squatted on the stones, chaffering over little heaps of queer vegetables and fruit, I found a native apostle of science and fatherly Government preaching the terrors of plague and the glory of redemption by serum. Before him was fixed a little spirit stove, on which boiling vaseline simmered. At his side was a glass saucer containing scraps of cotton wool dipped in strong carbolic. One hand gesticulated the truths of nature, the other held a little glass syringe, with a long, sharp beak, and any one could see that the syringe was half full of yellow salvation. Under the mingled influences of rhetoric and fear of death, a man stepped forward from the listening half-circle. With the carbolic wool the expositor washed the dust from the thin brown arm, told the patient to admire an imaginary bird in the opposite direction, just like a Margate photographer with a child, and plunged the sharp-nosed syringe first into the boiling vaseline and then under the brown skin. Instantly it was withdrawn, but a drop or two of the yellow salvation had gone, and for three or four months—say, for the length of one plague season, but only for that—the man was fairly safe. The crowd sighed its satisfaction, as when a rocket bursts. The place on the arm was wiped with carbolic wool. “Take his thumb mark, give him the paper of instructions, pay him his six annas,” said the apostle of bacillary science in Mahrati to a subordinate, and the labour of a fatherly Government struggling with adversity went doggedly on. FOOTNOTES: