Hoosanee

“ Grace saw the rajah at Delhi. Handsome fellow, like an Englishman she once met. As if a native could ever be like an Englishman. But Grace has such funny ideas.'
All this Hoosanee, who had studied the English language in the rajah's school at Gumilcund, understood perfectly.
The little lady ran back into the house, crying out, 'Grace! Grace! Come quickly! There's a man with garnets here; such beauties!' And, in the next moment, a young and very beautiful woman came out. From his corner Hoosanee looked at her. ”

“ Even Ganesh, desperately anxious as he was to keep up, was compelled to give in at last. Hoosanee, although his superb devotion prevented him from acknowledging it, showed, by the wild look in his eyes, that he was suffering from fever. Tom saw it all; but he would not give in. 'Let us at least find Tikaram!' he said to Hoosanee. 'We know that he has gone into this place. Sooner or later we must come upon his track. He is not alone as they are.'
One day, as they were plodding slowly on, a little cavalcade of men and camels and Ghoorka soldiers, coming from the opposite direction, met them. ”

“ But we must not be surprised if the others do not.'
'They will: they will. Chunder Singh knows. Chunder Singh is the friend of his Excellency. There is no fear,' said Hoosanee joyfully.
Then he left his master and presented himself at the door of the tent where Grace was resting. Kit was just outside. He saw him and gave a joyful cry of recognition. Grace heard it and started up. 'Who has come? What has happened?' she cried.
'Oh!' said Kit, rushing in, 'it's Tom's bearer. It's Hoosanee. They did not kill him after all. Hooray! Hooray! Three cheers! Grace! Grace! ”

“ It would be curious if Grace could have wandered so far, but Hoosanee says it is not at all impossible. Since the day when she was said to have been put out of the fort held by Dost Ali Khan more than three weeks have gone by. I tremble as I write the words. I scarcely dare to credit them. Three weeks! She may have died long since. If she is alive still—Ah! I cannot write! I cannot think! God help me! Let me preserve my reason, at least until I know! Then do with me as Thou wilt. I will be dumb!'
'Three more days of rapid travelling have gone by. ”

“ Hoosanee should have the honour and joy of watching over the sweetest woman on all the earth; Chunder Singh should hold himself in readiness to obey the first summons to arms, and Tom had spies posted in the different villages on the route between Nowgong and Gumilcund, so that Hoosanee's messages might be passed on from one to another, and that help could reach him speedily. ”

“ Hoosanee said nothing; his eyes followed those of his master. Tom asked temperately if, in their opinion, there was any fear to be entertained of their encountering detachments of the rebels here. They believed not. Later there would, no doubt, be many fugitives from the revolted troops, but there had not as yet been any English victory of sufficient importance to cause the rebels to despair. If they fled from one place they would join their comrades in another. But jungle-fever was a worse enemy than revolted sepoys. ”

“ Am I to be tortured for ever? I have tried this double life, and I cannot live it; I must choose to be one, and I choose to be myself. I am Tom Gregory. I am Grace's lover.'
There was a pause, during which he seemed to be listening to voices in the air. Hoosanee threw himself on his face and lay like one dead. Darkness gathered about them, and the silence in the great room was as the silence of the grave. And then the rajah's voice, deep and passionate, broke forth again. ”

“ He knew, moreover, as even his master could not, how cruel and shameless an Eastern mob could be; and the idea of her falling alive into the hands of the mutineers made him sick with horror. Hoosanee, we must remember, belonged to Gumilcund. Except during the last few months, when he had served the new rajah, who was much gentler in his manners to those depending upon him than any grandee of the East, he had never been brought into direct contact with English people. ”

“ Hoosanee—the bearer of the late rajah and his own principal servant—was the medium of communication. When the work of the day was over—the long march, or the patient quest into the secrets of antiquity—Brahmin priests and Brahmin beggars, old soldiers, dispossessed landowners, and native merchants both Hindu and Mohammedan, would be introduced by him into the tent where sat the English-bred youth in his Oriental dress, ready and anxious to discuss the questions that separate East and West. On these occasions Tom would sometimes surprise himself. He would sit down ignorant. ”

“ He took a more wholesome and a larger view of life. Away from the pestilential swamps of the fever-haunted jungle, and under the wide benignant sky, he could forget the wild agony of despair that for so many days had bound him in prison; he could believe that it was not madness, but a sound philosophy, which caused men everywhere to expect and to work for the redemption of humanity.
Here and there he speaks of Grace, but only briefly. 'My darling is better,' he writes on one occasion. 'I think Hoosanee is doing her good. He understands how to make her comfortable. ”

“ Anything to equal the climate of this Indian winter Tom had never seen. Morning after morning there would be the same brisk, invigorating air; day after day the same dark blue heavens, unbroken by the lightest cloud, would overarch, like a blessing from the Almighty, the vast plains through which they were travelling; and evening after evening the same rose-lilac hue, wonderful beyond the power of words to describe, would steal over the sky. Hoosanee was their guide, and his ways afforded some amusement and occasionally a little annoyance to his master. ”

“ Unconsciously we work out our destiny, and expiate the offences of which we have no memory. But to those who rise in being it is given to rise also in knowledge. These see behind them the path by which they have come, and the road they must travel on their way to the Supreme lies open in front of them. To this stage my master, the rajah, had come. Once more, it was revealed to him that he should return to the earth.'
Here Hoosanee stopped, and looked at his master in a strange, wistful way, like one pleading for a boon.
'Well!' said Tom. ”

“ Scarcely knowing what she did, but hoping against hope that she might save her darling Kit, Grace, following the directions of the guide, leapt into a shallow ditch, and drew the long grass over herself and the child. 'If they let me live, I will come back to you,' he whispered; 'if not, go on straight to the next village and say that Hoosanee, the servant of the Rajah of Gumilcund, has sent you to his father. He will guard you till you reach the city. Farewell, noble lady!' And he returned to the cart. ”

“ These were the news which met the Rajah of Gumilcund when, journeying warily, he drew near to the gates of his own city.
Things had been going well with him since he parted from Gambier Singh. The country was much quieter than he had expected; the villages received them well; they had no difficulty about supplies; their force was large enough to frighten away the hordes of robbers that haunted the highways; and Hoosanee, who was their guide, took very good care that there should be no chance encounters with mutineers. ”

“ I am selfish to keep you up so long. Good-night! I will see you again to-morrow.'
'May the sleep of my gracious lady be sweet, and may the gods preserve her from evil!' said Hoosanee fervently.
He went out, to find the rajah waiting for him with eager questions. Then Bâl Narîn joined them. A runner had come out in search of the rajah. He brought intelligence of a great and notable Ghoorka victory, which had resulted in the complete pacification of the district between the Nepaul frontier and the Kingdom of Oude. Gambier Singh was triumphant. ”

“ The so-called Hoosier dialect, where it survives at all, is the speech of the first American settlers in Indiana, greatly modified by time and schooling, but retaining, both in the employment of colloquial terms and in pronunciation, the peculiarities that were carried westward from tide water early in the nineteenth century. The distinctive Indiana countryman, the real Hoosier, who has been little in contact [47] with the people of cities, speaks a good deal as his Pennsylvania or North Carolina or Kentucky grandfather or great-grandfather did before him, and has created nothing new. ”

“ This was nothing uncommon, certainly; but his proceedings had become mysterious to me for a long time before, and I could not help connecting his frequent and long absences with his true profession, whatever that might be. He could not be only a cloth merchant: there was nothing in that plodding business to hold out to him or to me the splendid hopes which Hoosein and the rest evidently entertained, and with which I had no doubt he was familiar. It must be something beyond this, which I could not compass; and to see whether I could get any clue to it, I betook myself to the old Moola. ”

“ These taunts produced fights in the market house and streets of Louisville. On one occasion a stout bully from Indiana was victor in a fist fight, and having heard Colonel Lehmanowsky lecture on the "Wars of Europe," who always gave martial prowess to the German Hussars in a fight, pronouncing hussars "hoosiers" the Indianian, when the Kentuckian cried "enough," jumped up and said: "I am a Hoosier," and hence the Indianians were called by that name. This was its true origin. I was in the State when it occured. [8]
Unfortunately, others are equally positive as to their "true origins." ”

“ In olden times the French voyageur, paddling his canoe from Montreal to New Orleans, sang cheerily through the Hoosier wilderness, little knowing that one day men should stand all night before bulletin boards in New York and Boston awaiting the judgment of citizens of the Wabash country upon the issues of national campaigns. The Hoosier, pondering all things himself, cares little what Ohio or Illinois may think or do. ”

“ It has been insisted by loyal Indianians that the speech of the later generations of natives is almost normal English; that the rough vernacular of their ancestors has been ground down in the schools, and that the dictionaries are [46] rapidly sanctioning new words, once without authority, that inevitably crept into common speech through the necessities of pioneer expression. It may fairly be questioned whether, properly speaking, there ever existed a Hoosier dialect. The really indigenous Indiana words and novel pronunciations are so few as to make but a poor showing when collected ”

“ To ‘set’ was the right way to sit; an Indian did not scalp, he ‘skelped’: a child did not long for a thing, he ‘honed’ for it,—slang retains this Hoosier archaism; a woman was not dull, she was ‘daunsy’; commonly a gun was ‘shot’ instead of fired in all moods and tenses. ”

“ Pardon my delay in answering your question concerning the word "hoosier" in this section. The word means a native of Indiana, and has a rare popular sense of a backwoodsman, a rustic. One hears: "He is a regular hoosier."
Mrs. John M. Judah, of Memphis, writes:
About the word "Hoosier"—one hears it in Tennessee often. It always means rough, uncouth, countrified. "I am a Hoosier," I have said, and my friends answer bewilderingly, "But all [Pg 21] Indiana-born are Hoosiers," I declare, "What nonsense!" ”

“ Harwood's white-gloved hand led her hither and thither through the intricate maze; one must have been sadly lacking in the pictorial sense not to have experienced a thrill of delight in a scene so animate with grace, so touched with color. It was ungracious to question the sincerity of those who pronounced Marian the belle of the ball when Colonel Ramsay, the supreme authority in Hoosier pulchritude, declared her to be the fairest rose in a rose-garden of girls. ”

“ My remark was caught up by some bystander, and the word hussar construed to mean the men of the State of Indiana (from which I had just come) , and thus the word "Hoosier" came into existence. Such is the irony of fate! Learned men have labored long to introduce some favored word of the most approved classic derivation, and as a rule have failed. Here a chance word of mine, miscalled by an ignorant loafer, catches the popular fancy and passes into Literature. ”

“ Sister Mary Genevieve was born at Vevay, of Protestant parents, and died at the convent of St. Mary’s of the Woods near Terre Haute. Albion Fellows Bacon, Mrs. D. M. Jordan, Richard Lew Dawson, and William R. Williams have also been creditable contributors to the Hoosier anthology.
Indiana offers, on the whole, a fair field for poets. The prevailing note of the landscape is tranquillity. There is hardly a spot in the State that touches the imagination with a sense of power or grandeur, and yet there are countless scenes of quiet beauty. ”

“ Upon a certain occasion there one of these rustic professors of the "noble art" very adroitly and successfully practiced the "fancy" upon several individuals at one time. Being himself not a native of the Western world, in the exuberance of his exultation he sprang up, exclaiming, in a foreign accent, "I'm a hoosier, I'm a hoosier." Some of the New Orleans papers reported the case, and afterwards transferred the corruption of the word "husher" (hoosier) to all the boatmen from Indiana, and from thence to all her citizens. ”