Jamie Macdonald has now a contract for dyeing the Blue ribbons of the Turf; Tommy Begg has taken the blue boars and the Oxford Blues; and Bobby Thomas does the blue-books and the True Blues. It may not be generally known that the aristocracy do not employ aniline dyes for their blue blood. The minor Planters do business chiefly in blue stockings, blue bonnets, blue bottles, blue beards, and blue coats. For more information of this kind I can only refer you to Mr. Caird and the _Nineteenth Century_. Some Planters grow tea, coffee, lac, mother-of-pearl, pickles, poppadums and curry powder--but now I am becoming encyclopædic and scientific, and trespassing on ground already taken up by the Famine Commission. Fewer Planters are killed now by wild camels who roam over the mango fields, but a good deal of damage is still done to the prickly pear-trees. Mr. Cunningham has written an interesting note on this. Rewards have still to be offered for dead tigers and persons who have died of starvation. "When the Government will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian."-- ALI BABA, K.C.B. No. XIII THE EURASIAN A STUDY IN CHIARO-OSCURO [Illustration: THE EURASIAN--"A study in chiaro oscuro."] [November 1, 1879.] The Anglo-Indian has a very fine eye for colour. He will mark down "one anna in the rupee" with unerring certainty; he will suspect smaller coin. He will tell you how he can detect an adulterated European by his knuckles, his nails, his eyebrows, his pronunciation of the vowels, and his conception of propriety in dress, manner, and conduct. To the thorough-bred Anglo-Indian, whose blood has distilled through Haileybury for three generations, and whose cousins to the fourth degree are Collectors and Indian Army Colonels, the Eurasian, however fair he may be, is a _bête noir_. Mrs. Ellenborough Higgins is always setting or pointing at black blood. And sometimes the whitey-brown man is objectionable. He is vain, apt to take offence, sly, indolent, sensuous, and, like Reuben, "unstable as water." He has a facile smile, a clammy hand, a manner either forward or obsequious, a mincing gait, and not always the snowiest linen. [In very dangerous cases he has a peculiar smell.] Towards natives the Eurasian is cold, haughty, and formal; and this attitude is repaid, with interest, in scorn and hatred. There is no concealing the fact that to the mild Gentoo the Eurasian is a very distasteful object. But having said this, the case for the prosecution closes, and we may turn to the many soft and gentle graces which the Eurasian develops.