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Updated: May 1, 2025
Now and then a face of ivory glimmered through a gauzy veil and eyes of ink and diamonds shot starry glances from passing carriage windows. Erect English women drove high dog-carts. Gordon Highlanders swung along in the kilt, more at home in Cairo then in Edinburgh, the droning of their pipes as Oriental as the drone of a raeita, or the beat of tom-toms.
"What an idea!" exclaimed Grace. "I've seen little beggar children drawing a dog-cart. Grandma'll never allow such a thing." "Indeed I will," said grandma, tying on her checked apron. "Dog-carts or wheel-barrows, so they only take care not to be rude. In a city it is different."
How should one protect the privacy of a palace gate if unknown memsahibs in dog-carts, with saises who knew English but did not answer when spoken to in the native tongue, were to be allowed to draw up in front of the gate at unseemly hours and remain there indefinitely. The risaldar ordered Tess away without further ceremony, making his meaning plain by taking the horse's head and starting him.
Europeans, accustomed to see carriages, dog-carts and all kinds of horse-drawn conveyances circulating freely on macadamised roads, find it difficult to realise that, in the oldest civilised empire in existence, there are, outside the treaty-ports, not only no macadamised roads, but not even roads that could possibly be compared with our most out-of-the-way and most ill-kept country lanes, and that consequently there are neither carriages nor dogcarts, but only springless tumbrils, which, covered with a wain, discharge the functions of the celestial cab, and plough through deep mud with their massive wheels, or jolt over stone causeways to the intense discomfort of luckless occupants.
And here the sportsmen and ladies congregate by degrees, men from a distance in dog-carts generally arriving first, as being less able to calculate the time with accuracy.
And then, seemingly displeased with himself for having allowed his tongue to get the better of his dignity, he walked away to the fire, musing, doubtless, on the difference between Maurice Frere, with a quarter of a million, disporting himself in the best society that could be procured, with command of dog-carts, prize-fighters, and gamecocks galore; and Maurice Frere, a penniless lieutenant, marooned on the barren coast of Macquarie Harbour, and acting as boat-builder to a runaway convict.
When the knights entered the lists on the seats of their dog-carts, with their squires beside them, and their shining tandems before them, they took the light well, too, and the spectacle was so brilliant that I trust my imagery may be forgiven a novelist pining for the pageantries of the past.
Indeed, the scene on the Simpang Road about three in the afternoon, when the merchants are returning to their offices after the midday siesta, resembles that on Fifth Avenue at the rush hour, the broad thoroughfare being literally packed from curb to curb with vehicles of every description: the ramshackle little victorias known as mylords, the high, two-wheeled dog-carts, with their seats back to back, called sados, the two-pony cabs termed kosongs, creaking bullock carts with wheels higher than a man, hand-cars and rickshaws hauled by dripping coolies, and other coolies staggering along beneath the weight of burdens swinging from the carrying-poles called pikolans, and every make and model of motor-cars from ostentatious, self-important Rolls-Royces to busybody Fords.
Fine ladies in all the colours of the rainbow; and swarthy, beady-eyed dames, with their stalwart, big-calved, basket-carrying comrades; gentle young people from behind the counter; Dandy Candy merchants from behind the hedge; rough-coated dandies with their silver-mounted whips; and Shaggyford roughs, in their baggy, poacher-like coats, and formidable clubs; carriages and four, and carriages and pairs; and gigs and dog-carts, and Whitechapels, and Newport Pagnels, and long carts, and short carts, and donkey carts, converged from all quarters upon the point of attraction at Broom Hill.
On his rounds for he let nothing interfere with his work heavy farmers in dog-carts, who opposed him at vestry meetings, stopped to ask after Regie.
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