48 
SCENES IN INDIA. 
CHAPTER IV. 
HOUSES OF THE HILL-MEN. CIVILIAN IN CALCUTTA. 
It is remarkable that a race so degraded in morals 
as the Himalaya mountaineers, and whose general 
habits are so remote from those of a civilized people, 
should occasionally assume an external refinement, to 
which nations standing much higher in the scale of 
positive civilization, are comparatively strangers. Not- 
withstanding their brutal habits in other respects and 
the cringing servility with which they approach a su- 
perior, or any one who has the means of benefiting 
them, they have, nevertheless, an ease and amenity 
of manner not at all inferior to the highlanders of 
European countries. Their address is commonly free 
and unembarrassed, except when they have any ul- 
terior object in view, in which case they exhibit all 
the mean humiliation of semi-barbarians. They are 
for the most part comfortably clad and their houses 
well constructed, clean and convenient, by comparison 
with those of the poor who inhabit the Alps or the 
highlands of Scotland. The very lowest among them 
are indeed an exception, for poverty and destitution 
are peculiar to no country but known in all. 
The farmers of these mountains display no little 
skill in agriculture when the stubborn nature of the 
