Everybody with experience agrees that well-trained Hindu servants are quick, attentive and respectful and ingenious.  F. Marion Crawford in “Mr. Isaacs” says:  “It has always been a mystery to me how native servants manage always to turn up at the right moment.  You say to your man, ‘Go there and wait for me,’ and you arrive and find him waiting; though how he transferred himself thither, with his queer-looking bundle, and his lota and cooking utensils and your best teapot wrapped up in a newspaper and ready for use, and with all the hundred and one things that a native servant contrives to carry about without breaking or losing one of them, is an unsolved puzzle.  Yet there he is, clean and grinning as ever, and if he were not clean and grinning and provided with tea and cheroots, you would not keep him in your service a day, though you would be incapable of looking half so spotless and pleased under the same circumstances yourself.”

Every upper servant in an Indian household has to have an under servant to assist him.  A butler will not wash dishes or dust or sweep.  He will go to market and wait on the table, but nothing more.  A cook must have a coolie to wash the kitchen utensils, and wait on him.  He will do nothing but prepare the food for the table.  A coachman will do nothing but drive.  He must have a coolie to take care of the horse, and if there are two horses the owner must hire another stable man, for no Hindu hostler can take care of more than one, at least he is not willing to do so.  An American friend has told me of his experience trying to break down one of the customs of the East, and compelling one native to groom two horses.  It is too long and tearful to relate here, for he was finally compelled to give in and hire a man for every horse and prove the truth of Kipling’s poem: 

  “It is not good for the Christian race
  To worry the Aryan brown;
    For the white man riles,
    And the brown man smiles,
  And it weareth the Christian down
    And the end of the fight
    Is a tombstone white
  With the name of the late deceased,
    And the epitaph clear: 
    A fool lies here,
  Who tried to hustle the East.”

That’s the fate of everybody who goes up against established customs.  And so we hired a “bearer.”

There were plenty of candidates.  They appeared in swarms before our trunks had come up from the steamer, and continued to come by ones and twos until we had made a selection.  They camped outside our rooms and watched every movement we made.  They sprang up in our way from behind columns and gate-posts whenever we left the hotel or returned to it.  They accosted us in the street with insinuating smiles and politely opened the carriage door as we returned from our drives.  They were of all sizes and ages, castes and religions, and, strange to say, most of them had become Christians and Protestants from their strong desire to please.