A quick glance, as I passed in, informed me that Karlee's house
consisted of four rooms; probably two sleeping apartments, one for the
men and another for the women, a kitchen, and a common room for meals,
family chats, and visitors. Like all true Hindoo houses, uncorrupted by
the European innovations which snobbish baboos affect, it contained but
few articles of furniture, and those of the simplest and most
indispensable description,--nothing for luxury, nothing for show. To the
outfit of the poorest laborer's domicile he added little more than a
white cloth spread over checkered Chinese matting, to stand for chair,
table, and bed; a cushion or two to recline upon; a few earthen vessels
of the better quality, to hold rice or water; a brass lamp for cocoa-nut
oil; several more primitive lamps rudely made of the shell of the
cocoa-nut; an iron mortar and pestle--foreign, of course--for pounding
curry; a couple of _charpoys_, or wooden cots; a few brass _lotahs_, or
drinking-cups; and two or three hubble-bubbles. But the crowning glories
were a Chinese extension chair, of bamboo and wicker, and quite a pretty
hookah,--both evidently dedicated to company occasions. These were all
that I could see in the two rooms to which I was admitted, and these
were no doubt the very splendors of Karlee's establishment.
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