Like the rest I'm on leave too. I converted myself into a Government Secretary, awarded myself one month on full pay with the chance of an extension, and went off. Then it rained and hailed, and rained again, and I ran up and down this tiny country in trains trying to find a dry place. After ten days I came back to town, having been stopped by the sea four times. I was rather like a kitten at the bottom of a bucke chasing its own tail. So I'm sitting here under a grey, muggy sky wondering what sort of time they are having at Simla. It's August now. The rains would be nearly over, all the theatricals would be in full swing, and Jakko Hill would be just Paradise. You're probably pink with prickly heat. Sit down quietly under the punkah and think of Umballa station, hot as an oven at four in the morning. Think of the dak-gharry slobbering in the wet, and the first little cold wind that comes round the first corner after the tonga is clear of Kalka. There's a wind you and I know well. It's blowing over the grass at Dugshai this very moment, and there's a smell of hot fir trees all along and along from Solon to Simla, and some happy man is flying up that road with fragments of a tonga-bar in his eye, his pet terrier under his arm, his thick clothes on the back-seat and the certainty of a month's pure joy in front of him. _Instead of which_ you're being stewed at Hakaiti and I'm sitting in a second-hand atmosphere above a sausage-shop, watching three sparrows playing in a dirty-green tree and pretending that it's summer. I have a view of very many streets and a river. Except the advertisements on the walls, there isn't one speck of colour as far as my eye can reach. The very cat, who is an amiable beast, comes off black under my hand, and I daren't open the window for fear of smuts. And this is better than a soaked and sobbled country, with the corn-shocks standing like plover's eggs in green moss and the oats lying flat in moist lumps. We haven't had any summer, and yesterday I smelt the raw touch of the winter. Just one little whiff to show that the year had turned. "Oh, what a happy land is England!"