Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m. INDIAN SEKVANTS. Everyrody in India has servants—every European, at any rate. There is no such arrangement known as depending upon the servants of other people, as do bachelors of moderate means, and others who choose to live in lodgings in England. A native will not serve two masters —at least, not avowedly. He has been sometimes known to take two salaries under the rose, and to divide his attentions between two persons —but in such a case the dishonesty compensates -him, I suppose, for the unnatural character of the proceeding. As a general rule, the humblest of Europeans in India employ natives still humbler to do their bidding. If a gentleman keep an European man-servant—a very rare occurrence, by the way—that man-servant will keep at least one native, to whom he stands in the proudrelation of master. And if a lady keep an European maid—which is much more frequent—that maid will have her native ayah almost as a matter of course. Even soldiers in barracks do not attend upon themselves as they do in England. Cavalry troopers have a certain number of syces assigned them to look after their horses; and in the infantry, also, natives do a great deal of the rough work for the men, who have an easy time of it compared with their daily experience in this country. In India, in fact, everybody has a subordinate—the native servants themselves finding others of a lower class to do their bidding. In England, Captain Absolute lords it over Fag, and Fag lords it over the Boy: in India, the boy has somebody to lord it over too, and the boy's somebody has Ids victim. You may suppose, therefore, that an Englishman in India who happens to be a gentleman —or to occupy the position of one—has a little troop of dependants always at his back. They are a great nuisance at first. He does n...