The sounds contended with a thin, scattered strumming of cafe mandolins, the tinkle of glasses, the steady click of dominoes and backgammon; then were drowned in the harsh chatter of Arab coolies who, all grimed as black as Nubians, and shouldering spear-headed shovels, tramped inland, their long tunics stiff with coal-dust, like a band of chain-mailed Crusaders lately caught in a hurricane of powdered charcoal.

Through the inky files of the coaling-coolies burst an alien and bewildered figure.

" Followed by three coolies who popped out of the grass with game-bags, the young stranger descended, hopped nimbly from tussock to gunwale, and perched there to wash his boots in the river.

" Outside the gate of the compound, coolies crouching round a lantern sprang upright and whipped a pair of sedan-chairs into position.

With chairpoles backing into one shop or running ahead into another, with raucous cries from the coolies, he swung round countless corners, bewildered in a dark, leprous, nightmare bazaar.

At first, Rudolph thought the city loud and brawling; but resolving this impression to the hideous shouts of his coolies parting the crowd, he detected, below or through their noise, from all the long cross-corridors a wide and appalling silence.

Near at hand, coolies trotted and stooped, laying out more of these circular baskets, filled with tiny dough-balls.

The brilliant sunlight, the breeze stirring toward them from a background of drooping bamboos, the gabble of coolies, the faint aroma of the fermenting no-me cakes, began, after all, to give a truant sense of holiday.

The curtained window of a fantan shop still glowed in orange translucency, and from behind it came the murmur and the endless chinking of cash, where Fortune, a bedraggled, trade-fallen goddess, split hairs with coolies for poverty or zero.

" Squatting coolies sprang up and raced to hold his pony.

Coolies, flung asleep on the burnt grass, might have been corpses, but for the sound of their troubled breathing.

"Aow!" cried Nesbit, "the bloomin' coolies!"

But to the contractor there were no laws but of his making, and he laid on thirty lashes with the rhinoceros hide Kiboko to teach these stiff-necked "coolies" not to sham again.

B. once said to me, in talking of the difficulty of exercising a police over even English vessels which carry coolies to foreign ports:'Men-of-war have orders to seize vessels breaking the law; but as they are not prizes, and the captain if he seizes them wrongfully is liable to an action for damages, how can you expect them to act?'

Our enemy, however, had no notion of doing anything so ungenerous; so the landing went on uninterruptedly, the French carrying almost all they wanted on their backs, our men employing coolies, &c., for that purpose.

He has just been with me, and is in a great state because our soldiers, in their zeal to drive away all Chinese robbers, have driven away all his coolies.

He said he could not start, as the hired coolies from Kunis had been so terrified by the horrors of yesterday that they had departed in the night, sacrificing their pay rather than run any more risks with such daredevils as the mem-sahib and me.

The coolies were bone-lazy, the admiral and first-lieutenant were sulky, and the weather was stuffy and threatened thunderthe conditions were altogether detrimental to placidity of temper.

An appalling uproar was caused by the coolies and the unemployed upon the bridge, who all, as usual, gave unlimited advice to every one else as to the proper management of affairs under the existing circumstances, but did nothing whatever in support of their theories.

He walked about upon their stomachs a little to invigorate them, and, sending forthwith for a gang of coolies from an adjacent village which lay a little higher, he set the whole crowd to work to divert part of the stream by means of driftwood and damming, and was, in the end, able to save the houses and a good part of the crops.

When the hired coolies came to be paid for their labour, the villagers also put in a claim for wages, and were desperately vexed at my friend's refusal to grant it, complaining bitterly of having had to work hard for nothing!

He put much water in our milk, to the furious disgust of Sabz Ali, and he failed to provide the coolies I had ordered; I therefore reported him to Chattar Singh, and sent my messengers forth, like another Lars Porsena, to catch coolies.

Here I found Jane and the invalid comfortably disposed in a landau, but the baggage spread about anywhere, and the usual clamour of coolies uprising in the heated and dust-laden air.

At half-past ten this morning we set sail; that is to say, we hired nine extra coolies and a second shikara to tow, and advanced on Srinagar.

I am wild with impatience to be gone but neither bribes nor threats will hurry the coolies who take their time harnessing the donkeys and the camels.