Mark would not hear of appropriating an article which, in this hot climate, he understood to be as essential as one's boots, and had, in fact, already ordered a hired carriage for this enforced round of visits. His host at length departed for the High Court with semi-paternal injunctions that his guest must not skip a single name in his valuable list. Presently the hired bandy, which had been waiting under a tree for some time, was summoned, and Mark's butler, whom, on his host's recommendation he had engaged that morning, stood salaaming below the verandah steps preparatory to opening the carriage door. "Where master wishing to drive?" asked Narainswamy in his best English. "Morpeth house, Vepery," was the reply. CHAPTER V. In a quarter of Madras where dwelling houses were not separated by so many acres of garden ground as in the more fashionable suburbs, there stood, at the corner of a shady road, a white wooden gate. It was a feature rare in the Belgravia of the town where peeling chunam posts with rusty iron sockets were often the only traces of the departed gate; one of the changing tenants having probably demanded that it should be dispensed with, another that it should be replaced, to be assured by the obsequious landlord that the order would be executed at once, though the gate in question was most likely broken up for firewood or eaten by white ants, the polite Mussulman not having the remotest intention of replacing it, however much he might assure successions of tenants that the gate was on its way to be fitted to the old posts. But what mattered such traces of dilapidation to those often changing inmates? Were not pleasant homes, trim gateways, verdant lawns, awaiting them across the sea when the requisite number of rupees had been amassed, the years of service expired, and the exile only a memory? Within the precincts of this white gate, however, no change of owners had interrupted its careful tendance for many a year. No period of rankness had intervened in the trim compound. Under the tall grey pillar-like stems of the cocoanut-tope behind the bungalow, the grass, by means of much watering, was almost as green as an English lawn. Shapely tamarinds, dark mango, and neem trees brooded over the garden where a wealth of old-fashioned flowers grew and prospered, sheltered by various ingenious contrivances from the scorching rays of the sun and the devastation of the monsoon. Green colonnades of broad-leaved plantains, with their curious spikes of fruit, made a dividing line between the flower-beds and the well-kept vegetable garden at the end of which, beside the tank, a _picotta_ was mounted, where an agile coolie swung on the primitive pump, propelling the water from below and sending it along a labyrinth of little intersecting mud-channels percolating the thirsty earth.