in for that afterwards. He never concludes two transactions in one
day. When he has succeeded in reducing you to such a state of
irritability that it is not safe to mention money in your presence,
he stops at once and changes tactics. He brings the horse to the
door with a thick layer of dust on the saddle and awaits your onset
with the intrepid inquiry, "Can a saddle be kept clean without soap?"
I suppose a time will come when he will have got every article he can
possibly use, and it is natural to hope that he will then be obliged
to leave you. But this also is a delusion. On the contrary, his
resources only begin to develop themselves when he has got all he
wants. First one of the leather things on the horse's hind feet
gives way and has to be cobbled, then a rope wears out and must be
replaced, then a buckle gets loose and wants a stitch. But his chief
reliance is on the headstall and the nose-bag. When these have got
well into use, one or other of them may be counted on to give way
about every other day, and when nothing of the original article is
left, the patches of which it is composed keep on giving way. Each
repair costs from one to three pice, and it puzzles one to conceive
what benefit a well-paid groom can derive from being the broker in
such petty transactions. But all the details of life in this country
are microscopical, not only among the poor, but among those whose
business is conducted in lakhs. I have been told of a certain well-
known, wealthy mill-owner who, when a water Brahmin at a railway
station had supplied him and all his attendants with drinking-water,
was seen to fumble in his waistband, and reward the useful man with
one copper pie. A pie at present rates of exchange is worth about
47/128 of a farthing, and it is instructive to note that emergency,
when it came, found this Croesus provided with such a coin.

Now it is evident that if the syce can extort two pice from you for