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Modern India by William Eleroy Curtis
page 42 of 506 (08%)
of it. You cannot get better anywhere, and at places near the
sea they serve an abundance of fish. Vegetables are plenty and
are usually well cooked. The coffee is poor and almost everybody
drinks tea. You seldom sit down to a hotel table in India without
finding chickens cooked in a palatable way for breakfast, lunch
and dinner, and eggs are equally good and plenty. The bread is
usually bad, and everybody calls for toast. The deserts are usually
quite good.

It takes a stranger some time to become accustomed to barefooted
servants, but few of the natives in India of whatever class wear
shoes. Rich people, business men, merchants, bankers and others
who come in contact on equal terms with the foreign population
usually wear them in the streets, but kick them off and go around
barefooted as soon as they reach their own offices or their homes.
Although a servant may be dressed in elaborate livery, he never
wears shoes. The butlers, footmen, ushers and other servants
at the government house in Calcutta, at the viceregal lodge at
Simla, at the palace of the governor of Bombay, and the residences
of the other high officials, are all barefooted.

Everybody with experience agrees that well-trained Hindu servants
are quick, attentive and respectful and ingenious. F. Marion
Crawford in "Mr. Isaacs" says: "It has always been a mystery
to me how native servants manage always to turn up at the right
moment. You say to your man, 'Go there and wait for me,' and you
arrive and find him waiting; though how he transferred himself
thither, with his queer-looking bundle, and his lota and cooking
utensils and your best teapot wrapped up in a newspaper and ready
for use, and with all the hundred and one things that a native
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