Then the delightful feeling of security, and the certainty that your bearers won't shy, or come into collision, or go off the rails, or otherwise injure your nerves or bones. You are independent of hotels and hospitality. If the traveller in India depended upon the former, he would pass many a night with the kerbstone for his pillow, if he had not courage to claim the latter--which, be it remembered, he is certain to receive abundantly at the hands of the Burra Sahib. A modest man has his palkee; and for lack of courage on the one hand, and a rest-house on the other, he orders himself to be set down for the night by the wayside, and, shutting the doors towards the road, after boiling the water and making tea with the apparatus contained in his pantry, he lights his lamp, reads for an hour, pulls a light shawl over him, turns round, and goes to sleep as soundly as if he were sumptuously couched in Belgravia. If the palkee be a good one, it defies weather; but I admit it is not pleasant, on a dark night, to be carried along a slippery road with a careless set of bearers. During the whole period of our journey since we had left Agra, with one or two breaks in its ordinary routine, we seemed to have been passing a monotonous existence at the same small and uncomfortable bungalow. It consists of two rooms; in front is a tope of trees; behind are a few low sandstone or trap hills, some scrubby bushes climbing up the sides, out of which a partridge may easily be flushed: for the rest, the view extends over a boundless plain, assuming during the heat of the day a light yellow colour, at which period the coolies are all asleep in the verandah, snoring in an infinite and interesting variety of notes and keys. At sunset we take a constitutional, followed by our portable residences, into which, after a romantic tea-drinking by the roadside, we turn in for the night, awaking at daylight to find ourselves thirty miles nearer to our journey's end, in a bungalow precisely similar to the one we had lately quitted, and containing the same rickety table, greasy with the unwiped remains of the last traveller's meal, which the book will inform you was eaten a month ago--the same treacherous chairs, which look sound until you inadvertently sit upon them--the same doubtful-looking couch, from which the same interesting round little specimens emerge, much to the discomfort of the occupant--the same filthy bathroom, which it is evident the traveller a month ago did not use--the identical old kitmutgar or bungalow-keeper, who looks as uncivilized as the bungalow itself, and seems to partake of its rickety and dirty nature--the same clump of trees before, and the same desert plain behind;--all tend to induce the belief either that you have never left the bungalow in which you spent the previous day, or that some evil genius has transported the said bungalow thirty miles for the express purpose of persecuting you with its horrors and miserable accommodation.