growing a type. Mostly their faces were gentle and kind, and only now
and then hard or cruel; but one need not be especially averse to the
English classification of our species to feel that they had cost more
than they were worth. The very handsomest man I saw, with the most
perfectly patrician profile (if we imagine something delicately aquiline
to be particularly patrician), was a groom who sat his horse beside
Rotten Row, waiting till his master should come to command the services
of both. He too had the look of long descent, but if it could not be
said that he had cost the nation too much time and money, it might still
be conjectured that he had cost some one too much of something better.

Next after these beautiful people I think that in the multitudinously
varied crowd of London I saw no men so splendidly, so brilliantly, so
lustrously handsome as three of those imperial British whose lives are
safer, but whose social status is scarcely better than that of our
negroes. They were three tall young Hindoos, in native dress, and white-
turbaned to their swarthy foreheads, who suddenly filed out of the
crowd, looking more mystery from their liquid eyes than they could well
have corroborated in word or thought, and bringing to the metropolis of
the West the gorgeous and foolish magnificence of the sensuous East.
What did they make of the metropolis? Were they conscious, with or
without rebellion, of their subjection, their absolute inferiority in
the imperial scheme? If looks went for what looks rarely do, except in
women, they should have been the lords of those they met; but as it was
they were simply the representatives of one of the suppressed races
which, if they joined hands, could girdle the globe under British rule.
Somehow they brought the sense of this home to the beholder, as none of
the monuments or memorials of England's imperial glory had done, and
then, having fulfilled their office, lost themselves in the crowd.