THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



NOVEMBER, 1892. 







EURASIA. 



By SARA JEANNETTE DUNCAN. 



Note. — " Cutcha " — inferior. " Burra lord sahib " — Great lord sahib — the viceroy. 

 " Dull " — pulse. " Dhoty " — loin-cloth. " Jat " — race. " Syce " — groom. " Qui hai ! " — 

 call to servants — " Whoever is there ? " — facetious name for old Anglo-Indians. " Baboo " 

 — educated Bengali. " Bearer " — personal servant. " Kitmutgar " — table-servant. " Mus- 

 salchi " — washer of dishes. " Talub " — wages. " Turn bai-adab hai " — " You are without 

 respect." " Durzie" — native tailor. " BelatV — foreign. '■'■Gharries' 1 '' — carriages. 



FROM a back window of my tall house in Calcutta I see her 

 nearly every day, the lady who may personify Eurasia. She 

 is amply qualified to do it ; Nature in molding her permitted her 

 to lack no characteristic that could contribute to make her a gen- 

 erous racial type. She is cast upon the comfortable lines common 

 to her people — lines that could not be indicated in avoirdupois 

 under two hundred-weight. They are more evident to me than 

 even this statement of fact can make them to the public, since 

 Mrs. De Souza — her name is De Souza — is usually clad, when she 

 comes under my observation, in a casual calico dressing-gown, 

 which leaves little of her benevolent person to be invented. The 

 dressing-gown is open at the throat on account of the tempera- 

 ture, but in compensation there is a great deal of it at the other 

 end ; it is en traine and has a flounce. Once, doubtless, it minis- 

 tered to her vanity, for even at that age — she is turned fifty — and 

 at that weight, Mrs. De Souza and vanity are not incompatible. 

 There is Mrs. De Souza's complexion, for example — she has al- 

 ways been very properly vain of that. It is quite an exceptional 

 complexion, oatmeal in tone. Eurasia, which verges from that to 

 mahogany, considers Mrs. De Souza "fair," and her claims to 



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