Who could endure the toothache patiently,"


much less the Dhobie. He is not tolerable. Submit to him we must,
since resistance is futile; but his craven spirit makes submission
difficult and resignation impossible. If he had the soul of a
conqueror, if he wasted you like Attilla, if he flung his iron into
the clothes-basket and cried Vae victis, then a feeling of respect
would soften the bitterness of the conquered; but he conceals his
ravages like the white ant, and you are betrayed in the hour of need.
When he comes in, limping and groaning under his stupendous bundle,
and lays out khamees, pyatloon, and pjama, all so fair and decently
folded, and delivers them by tale in a voice whose monotonous cadence
seems to tell of some undercurrent of perennial sorrow in his life,
who could guess what horrors his perfidious heart is privy to? Next
morning, when you spring from your tub and shake out the great jail
towel which is to wrap your shivering person in its warm folds, lo!
it yawns from end to end. There is nothing but a border, a fringe,
left. You fling on your clothes in unusual haste, for it is mail day
morning. The most indispensible of them all has scarcely a remnant
of a button remaining. You snatch up another which seems in better
condition, and scramble into it; but, in the course of the day, a
cold current of wind, penetrating where it ought not, makes you aware
of what your friends behind your back have noticed for some time,
viz., that the starch with which a gaping rent had been carefully
gummed together, that you might not see it, has melted and given way.
The thought of these things makes a man feel like Vesuvius on the eve
of an eruption; but you must wait for relief till Dhobie day next
week, and then the poltroon has stayed at home, and sent his brother
to report that he is suffering from a severe stomachache. When the