The old saw says, “Let a sleeping dog lie.”
Right.... Still, when there is much at stake
it is better to get a newspaper to do it.
—Pudd’nhead
Wilson’s New Calendar.
From diary:
January 28. I learned of an official Thug-book
the other day. I was not aware before that there
was such a thing. I am allowed the temporary
use of it. We are making preparations for travel.
Mainly the preparations are purchases of bedding.
This is to be used in sleeping berths in the trains;
in private houses sometimes; and in nine-tenths of
the hotels. It is not realizable; and yet it
is true. It is a survival; an apparently unnecessary
thing which in some strange way has outlived the conditions
which once made it necessary. It comes down from
a time when the railway and the hotel did not exist;
when the occasional white traveler went horseback
or by bullock-cart, and stopped over night in the
small dak-bungalow provided at easy distances by the
government—a shelter, merely, and nothing
more. He had to carry bedding along, or do without.
The dwellings of the English residents are spacious
and comfortable and commodiously furnished, and surely
it must be an odd sight to see half a dozen guests
come filing into such a place and dumping blankets
and pillows here and there and everywhere. But
custom makes incongruous things congruous.
One buys the bedding, with waterproof hold-all for
it at almost any shop —there is no difficulty
about it.
January 30. What a spectacle the railway station
was, at train-time! It was a very large station,
yet when we arrived it seemed as if the whole world
was present—half of it inside, the other
half outside, and both halves, bearing mountainous
head-loads of bedding and other freight, trying simultaneously
to pass each other, in opposing floods, in one narrow
door. These opposing floods were patient, gentle,
long-suffering natives, with whites scattered among
them at rare intervals; and wherever a white man’s
native servant appeared, that native seemed to have
put aside his natural gentleness for the time and
invested himself with the white man’s privilege
of making a way for himself by promptly shoving all
intervening black things out of it. In these
exhibitions of authority Satan was scandalous.
He was probably a Thug in one of his former incarnations.
Inside the great station, tides upon tides of rainbow-costumed
natives swept along, this way and that, in massed
and bewildering confusion, eager, anxious, belated,
distressed; and washed up to the long trains and flowed
into them with their packs and bundles, and disappeared,
followed at once by the next wash, the next wave.
And here and there, in the midst of this hurly-burly,
and seemingly undisturbed by it, sat great groups
of natives on the bare stone floor,—young,
