The Bishops Conversion

he blue smoke which arose from thousands of little fires around which half-clothed people were crouching in a vain attempt to keep warm. Shivering coolies with their heads and shoulders muffled in dirty white cotton sheets stood about waiting for a chance to carry luggage, and reminding Lillian, in their forgetfulness of their bare browa legs and feet, of spring chickens on wintry mornings. The wheels of small handcarts with their light weight of luggage shrieked as loudly in moving over the stone- paved floor as carts of ten times their dimensions should. Railway clerks with papers in their dark' hands went about with as much manner as American railway clerks, though without their briskness. Parties of native ladies, preceded by a waft of perfume, their faces covered, and their hands firmly grasping untold lengths and fullness of silken skirts, jingling many bangles and anklets, glided into waiting coaches, followed by servants carrying silver panboxes, hookahs, and innumerable bundles tied in old rags. Various and individual groups of people stood about, waiting for whomsoever the train might bring them. Here a cluster of callow subalterns, down to meet their colonel who had come on the same steamer as the Bishop; there a captain and his wife, the latter with a great bunch of cream and red roses in her hand, looking for her sister who was coming out with the colonel's wife for a winter in India, and whatever it might bring her in the way of amusement...