"I shall speak to Mr. B. to-day in a pretence
way to leave my present employment (follow-
ing)—that I have received an unexpected letter
from my home, stating my old mother is dangerous
ill, for which I am obliged to go down to
Calcutta. And if I submit a letter of resignation
without doing the above pretence, I think it
can detain me a fortnight more. Therefore I
have made my best way in a pretence manner to
leave my post within ¾ days by which I can get
out my last months salary, but to lose the
present cant help; I am obliged to do so, but I
hope I shall have no objection to draw my wages
from your department from the 1st of this
month; I hope you will allow me the same and
oblige.

"May I request the answer of it by the
bearer of this note.

"I am, sir,
"Your most obedient servant,
"RAM COOMAR Doss.

"P.S.—This is my permanent situation; I am
going to leave it; I had a great expectation in
future, though only by advice of yours leave it;
therefore I beg to state that you have to
consider in future for me."

The above, which may not be quite
comprehensible to the purely British understanding,
meant simply this: The writer wished to leave
his situation at once, to enter my service, but
desired to make as much as possible out of his
old employers before the change. If he left without
giving fifteen days' notice, according to law,
he would forfeit fifteen days' pay. This he
proposed to save by "making a pretence" that "his
old mother was dangerously ill," necessitating a
journey to Calcutta on the part of her devoted
son. By this plea he would get two or three
weeks' leave without the loss of pay, and this
time he proposed to spend in my service, giving
notice of resignation only when his leave was
up. By this arrangement he would still forfeit
fifteen days' pay; but then he would be gaining
it elsewhere, and in the mean time he would
enjoy the advantage of drawing pay from two
places at once. A notable scheme enough; but
even under these favourable circumstances he
was determined not to cut the ground from
under his feet, as is evinced by his precautionary
postscript, in which he mentions that the
appointment he was leaving was a permanent one,
holding forth good expectations, on which ground
he desired to impress upon me that I should
make up to him the advantages he was prepared
to forfeit in the future.

Now I do not mean to say that an Englishman
might not be capable of entertaining an analogous
scheme for cheating his employers; but I think
I am justified in believing that no European
would be such a fool as to parade his plan, and
think to recommend himself to a new master bv
exposing his willingness to impose upon the old.
The fact is, that this man—a Bengalee—had not
the smallest notion that there was any disgrace
in duplicity of the kind. It was quite natural
to him, and he conceived that it would be
admired by anybody else who was not the loser by
the plan; so I fancy I frightened him by giving
him a brief sketch of my ideas upon the subject.

"The old mother dangerous ill," I may add,
is a very common device among Indian servants;
though, less artistic than my friend Ram Coomar
Doss, they generally kill their parents outright.
Mussulmans and Hindoos are equally addicted
to it. If, for instance, Mohammed Ali, my
Khitmutgar, wants to disport himself for a
couple of days among his friends, he has not
courage to ask for a holiday—however sure he
might be of getting it upon general grounds—
but he comes with a very long face and tells me
that his father is dead; or if he said his father
last month he makes it his mother this month.
Next month it will be his father again, and so
on. According to his own account, he must
have had an unlimited supply of parents to begin
with. But though he should be well aware that
you cannot believe him unless you happen to
be an idiot, the fact does not prevent him from
repeating the "pretence" whenever he happens
to be without any other.

The chits which servants present when
applying for employment, sometimes contain a
personal description of the proper bearer, in
which case the imposition of the transfer
generally becomes manifest, as the transferee cannot
read English, and takes no trouble to provide
against such a contingency. Thus I remember
a little woman of eighteen or twenty, with a
remarkably smooth complexion, bringing a
certificate describing her as tall, about thirty, and
marked with the smallpox. On the discrepancy
as to size being pointed out, she misunderstood
the point, and said that she had grown taller
during the six months she had been out of
employment. This made matters worse, of course,
and the thirty years and smallpox finished her.
However, she took the rebuff quite coolly,
merely remarking that she had brought the
wrong chit, and would go and get another. She
went accordingly, but had not courage to come
back again; being, I suppose, unusually modest.

Many of the chits with which these people
are supplied, are not written by their former
employers at all, but are the concoctions of
native letter-writers, who get their living by
conducting correspondence between their less
accomplished countrymen and the Europeans.
The natives have a great idea of the dignity and
influence of a written communication as
compared with an oral one. Thus, if one of your
servants has an application of any importance
to make to you, he will frequently make it by
means of an English letter, although he would
have no difficulty in getting a hearing, and you
would have no difficulty in understanding what
he said. The scribes not being themselves, for
the most part, very proficient in English—
though their handwriting, as a general rule,
looks wonderfully European and business-like—
sometimes give a very lively idea of their client's
meaning. The following—which I copy from
the original—will serve as a sample of the general
style of the correspondence. It is a letter from