Little Karlee must have taken lessons in deportment with his primal pap;
and in India all good little boys, who hope to go to heaven when they
die, keep their noses clean, and never romp or whistle. As to girls it
matters less; the midwife gets only half price for consummating that
sort of blunder; for when you are dead only a son can carry you out and
bury you _dacent_,--no daughter, though she pray with the power and
perseverance of the Seven Penitents, can procure you a respectable
metempsychosis.
So far little Karlee had been lucky. This house, where he was born, was
lucky,--no one had ever died in it. When his dear mother could not spin
any more, they carried her to the Hooghly on a charpoy, and she had
breathed her last on the banks of the sacred river. Besides, his
grandfather had immediately stuck up a cooking-pot, striped with
perpendicular white lines, on a pole at the side of the house; so _he_
had never been in any danger from malicious incantations and the Evil
Eye. His education had been begun on a propitious day, else he might
have died or turned out a dunce. The very day he was born, a Brahmin--O
_so_ pious!--had hung a charm round his neck, and only charged grandpa
fifty rupees for it; when he went to the bazaar with his grandmother he
was always dressed in rags, to avert envy, and no one out of the family
knew his real name except his gooroo; all the other boys, and the
neighbors, called him Teencowry (three cowries[20]),--such a nice mean
name against spells and cross-eyed people! Once a strange Melican Sahib
had said, "Hello, Buster!" to him; but he wasn't at all frightened, for
his gooroo had taught him how to say a holy _mautra_[21] backwards; and
when the Melican Sahib passed on, he spat on his shadow and said it.
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