Chapter 60 - Page 2

They invade the house whenever they get a chance, and carry
off everything they don't want. One morning the master of the house was
in his bath, and the window was open. Near it stood a pot of yellow
paint and a brush. Some monkeys appeared in the window; to scare them
away, the gentleman threw his sponge at them. They did not scare at all;
they jumped into the room and threw yellow paint all over him from the
brush, and drove him out; then they painted the walls and the floor and
the tank and the windows and the furniture yellow, and were in the
dressing-room painting that when help arrived and routed them.

Two of these creatures came into my room in the early morning, through a
window whose shutters I had left open, and when I woke one of them was
before the glass brushing his hair, and the other one had my note-book,
and was reading a page of humorous notes and crying. I did not mind the
one with the hair-brush, but the conduct of the other one hurt me; it
hurts me yet. I threw something at him, and that was wrong, for my host
had told me that the monkeys were best left alone. They threw everything
at me that they could lift, and then went into the bathroom to get some
more things, and I shut the door on them.

At Jeypore, in Rajputana, we made a considerable stay. We were not in
the native city, but several miles from it, in the small European
official suburb. There were but few Europeans--only fourteen but they
were all kind and hospitable, and it amounted to being at home. In
Jeypore we found again what we had found all about India--that while the
Indian servant is in his way a very real treasure, he will sometimes bear
watching, and the Englishman watches him. If he sends him on an errand,
he wants more than the man's word for it that he did the errand. When
fruit and vegetables were sent to us, a "chit" came with them--a receipt
for us to sign; otherwise the things might not arrive. If a gentleman
sent up his carriage, the chit stated "from" such-and-such an hour "to"
such-and-such an hour--which made it unhandy for the coachman and his two
or three subordinates to put us off with a part of the allotted time and
devote the rest of it to a lark of their own.

We were pleasantly situated in a small two-storied inn, in an empty large
compound which was surrounded by a mud wall as high as a man's head. The
inn was kept by nine Hindoo brothers, its owners. They lived, with their
families, in a one-storied building within the compound, but off to one
side, and there was always a long pile of their little comely brown
children loosely stacked in its veranda, and a detachment of the parents
wedged among them, smoking the hookah or the howdah, or whatever they
call it. By the