In India Author:George Warrington Steevens Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 16 LORD, HAVE MERCY ON US I "HERE-we-have-some-ve-ry-char-act-er-is-tic-and-typ- i-cal-tem-per-a-ture-charts," said the doctor. A Parsi speaks English with... more » a staccato that accents every syllable alike. But for that you would hardly have distinguished the doctor, in his gold-rimmed spectacles, well-cut flannel suit, and grey pith helmet, from a swarthy European. The truth is that he has never been in Europe at all; yet he is one of the best- known authorities on bubonic plague in the world. Down the long, light, and airy ward—plague and light and air cannot live together—was a double row of some thirty beds, covered with violet blankets. From under each protruded a dark, small, close- cropped head. Some lay quite still with eyes tight shut; some stared up at the pointed roof with eyes moist and shining; one boy grinned almost merrily. All were sick of the plague; on statistics it was to be expected that three out of every four would die in the next few hours. NOBODY CARES. 17 At its first onset, two years ago, plague killed its two hundred and forty a-day; now it has sunk to fifty a-day, but it goes on steadily. Bombay has resigned herself to another four or five years of it— which means, at the present rate, that one-tenth of her population will die of it between now and 1904. Then what is to be done ? asks the practical Englishman. Ask the uneducated native, and he will say that the white Empress is angry because some blackguards defaced her statue two years ago; now that it is restored again things may be expected to go better. Ask the educated native, and he will placidly reply, "Nothing." Let it spend itself, let it become endemic, says he, finding much consolation in the Greek word. Human life has always been abundant and cheap in India. Here is the spectacle o...« less