TWO:Close to a field that had just been reaped four oxen yoked abreast were threshing out the grain, tramping round and round on a large sheet spread on the ground. The driver chanted a shrill, slow tune; further away women in red were gleaning, and a patriarch contemplated his estate, enthroned on a cart in a halo of sunset gold.To-day a religious festival; from the earliest hour everybody had donned new clothes, and in the [Pg 262]afternoon in the bazaar there was a masquerade of the lowest classembroidered dhotis, white robes, light-coloured turbans displaying large discs of green, red or blue. The men, even old men, ran after each other with bottles of coloured water, which they sprinkled far and near. One indeed had neither more nor less than a phial of violet ink, which, on the face and hands of a little black boy, shone with metallic lustre. One boy, in a clean garment, fled from a man who was a constant beggar from me, and who was pursuing him with some yellow fluid; and the fugitive was quite seriously blamed for disregarding the will of the gods and goddesses, whose festival it was.
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