From "To Be Held for Reference" by Rudyard Kipling:
“All things considered, I doubt whether you are the luckier. I do not refer to your extremely limited classical attainments, or your excruciating quantities, but to your gross ignorance of matters more immediately under your notice. That for instance.” — He pointed to a woman cleaning a samovar near the well in the centre of the Serai. She was flicking the water out of the spout in regular cadenced jerks.
“There are ways and ways of cleaning samovars. If you knew why she was doing her work in that particular fashion, you would know what the Spanish Monk meant when he said —
I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp —
In three sips the Aryan frustrate,
While he drains his at one gulp. —and many other things which now are hidden from your eyes
I get the Aryan reference, but the (apparently religious) meaning of cleaning the samovar in this particular way eludes me.
Why was the woman cleaning the samovar in that particular fashion?