white shells, which

wools, beads, and small appears to begin (or end) in the Balkans and stretches eastward through Central Asia into India, especially among the Biloch and other camel folk on our North-West frontier. Camel

THE LEADING CAMEL OF A KAFILA (AFGHANISTAN)

housings may be the beginning of the nomad industry of carpet weaving. It is perhaps not too fanciful to trace on the worsted neckband the original unit or starting-point of the carpets and "saddle-bags" which have given lessons to English upholsterers. There is not much room

U

for variety in a narrow fillet with only black, brown, and dingy white as a colour scheme, but you may watch a long Kafila go curtseying past and find no two neckbands quite alike in the arrangement of zig-zags, diamonds, bars, and squares. These bands, with more richly coloured rugs and saddle-bags, and the homely russet splendours of worsted cords, tassels, shells, and beads, with which the leading camel is adorned, are wrought by women. Like more women's work, it is done at intervals. The English lady complains that her Turkoman or Biloch rug lies unevenly on her parquet floor, and does not reflect that the perverse "buckling" marks the times when camp was shifted to follow the pasturing flocks, and the loom with its unfinished carpet was rolled up to be staked anew with Oriental carelessness as to straightness. "Saddle-bags," said a London tradesman to me, "have had their day, they've got common." This sounded sadly, but they will not cease to be for

all that.

CHAPTER XI

OF DOGS, FOXES, AND JACKALS

"Hev a dog, Miss!-they're better friends nor any Christian." GEORGE ELIOT, The Mill on the Floss.

For,

real character of the animal is concerned, and need not surprise or shock the English dog-lover. like the sacred writings of the Hindus and Muhammadans, our own Holy Bible, from which we profess to take our rules of life, contains the same low estimate, and has no hint of appreciation of canine character, no recognition of his services to man, no word of compassion for his fate. Yet Christians have learned and perfected the lore known to the Assyrian and the Greek of the varieties and qualities of dogs, and, following them rather than the ancient Hebrew, have come to love and cherish the unclean animal.

The wonder is that the Oriental has stuck so servilely to the skirts of his Scripture and taken so much to heart the belated nonsense that Moslem and Hindu authorities have uttered in disparagement of one of the best of God's creatures. He ought to have found out for himself that the figurative expressions of orators, poets, and law-givers have but a local and temporary significance; but if you look closely you will find that for centuries he has most faithfully tried to take all that he has been officially taught au pied de la lettre, and has crystallised the metaphors of poetry and the rhetorical flights of law-givers into canons of conduct. The enormous difficulty of this task has, of course, driven both Hindu and Moslem to much hypocrisy and compromise, but on the whole their faith is greater than anything we know of in the West.

The official condemnation of the dog by Muhammadans, and the formal terms in which he is outcasted by Hindus, are too monstrous and sweeping to hold good, when one considers the friendly nature of the beast and the real claim he has on the gratitude of mankind. But there are not many examples of human sympathy passing the narrow bounds of a cruel law. The ingenious Mr. Pope has a muchquoted passage about the poor Indian whose untutored mind leads him to hope that when admitted to the equal sky of heaven his faithful dog may bear him company. But ages before Mr. Pope lisped in numbers, and indeed before America was discovered,

Asiatic poetry had created the hero Yudhishtira,

who refused to enter heaven at all unless his dog might accompany him. Modern India, however, has for the most part forgotten Yudhishtira, and in these days the only dog admitted to the company of the Gods is a cur that serves as the vehicle or váhan of Bhairon, now one of the most popular of Hindu divinities. This deity bears a bottle of strong drink, in defiance of those shallow folk who claim all Hindus as total abstainers and Bands of Hope, and a staff which is vulgarly reckoned to be the Kotwal or town magistrate of Benares. His semblance is that of a black or dark blue man, whose raiment is a cloth round his loins and a serpent round his neck; his dog is a black tyke of low degree, nor does the canine race appear to gain in popular esteem from his association with the God, unless the very vulgar saying: "If all the dogs go on pilgrimage to Benares, who will be left to lick the dishes clean?" is an obscure reference to his sacred character.

Muhammadans have granted in popular lore a place in Paradise to Khetmir, the dog of the seven sleepers, who has been suspected of being the same animal as Yudhishtira's hound by some scholars. But they follow the Bible in speaking of him in injurious terms as an expression for disgust and loathing, unclean by immemorial prescription. It is written that the angels of God will not cross the threshold of a house whereon there is even a hair of a dog. If a dog is known to have drunk out of a vessel, it must be washed in seven waters. (A Muhammadan