As I sauntered back to the hotel I was conscious of a slight feeling of exacerbation. As if I had been "got at," "had." No man likes to feel that he is a laughing-stock. I felt that I had been made a laughing-stock just then; that, indeed, the process of manufacture had been going on ever since I showed my face in Ahmednugger. The men I had met were nice enough--in their way. Indeed, they were almost too nice--also in their way. They appeared to have so little to do, in the way of actual work, that they had made it the business of their lives to perfect themselves in what are usually regarded, say, as accomplishments. I was, and am, a plain civilian. I have worked for, and earned, my little pile, such as it is, and until I set out upon that pleasure tour in the East, it had never occurred to me that a man could be regarded as an uneducated idiot if he could not, say, run into double figures every time he took up his cue at billiards. A suspicion that a man might be so regarded had been dawning upon me ever since I arrived in India; but until I came to Ahmednugger I had never quite realised how shockingly my education had been neglected on exactly those points on which it ought to have been most carefully attended to. The men of Ahmednugger were the most sporting individuals I had ever yet encountered. Possibly I have not moved much among the congregations of the sporting men, but I certainly have seen something of men of business. These men of Ahmednugger were not only the keenest sportsmen I had encountered, they were the keenest men of business, too. And talk of the rigour of a competitive examination! They formed themselves into an examining board, which very soon took the "stiffening" out of me. They insisted on putting me through my paces before I had been a week in the place. They examined me in every game of cards which has been invented--and found me wanting in them all. They examined me as a rider, as a driver, as a shootist, as a cueist, in fact, in a range of subjects which I will not even venture to enumerate. They refused me one solitary "pass." They "plucked" me in them all. It did not add to my sense of satisfaction, that I found my ignorance expensive. The joke of the thing was, that before I came to India I had rather fancied myself as an amateur sportsman. I flattered myself that I had a decent seat in a saddle, whether across country or on the flat. I thought that I made a tolerable fourth at whist; that I had some notion, at any rate, of English billiards, and of a hazard off the red. I certainly was under the impression that I could see with tolerable accuracy along the barrel of a gun. But these vain delusions were scattered, at once and for ever, by the men of Ahmednugger. My all-round, purblind, insensate ignorance had been so convincingly displayed, that, as I have said, I was the laughing-stock of all the place.