I WAS roaming among the flower-beds and bowers of a “Peri’s Paradise,” known in Bombay as The Ladies Gymkhana, when I was startled by a voice like the sound of a passionate cart-wheel screaming for grease. “Lub ob my heart,” it cried, “my eshweet, don’t crei! don’t crei!” The owner of the voice was a woman with a negro type of countenance, as far as I remember, but her figure has remained with me better than her face. It was a portly figure, like that of a domestic duck in high condition, and her gait was, as Mr. Onoocool Chunder Mookerjee would say, “well quadrate” to the figure. Engulphed in her voluminous embrace was a little cherub, with golden curls and blue eyes dewy with passing tears—a pretty study of sunshine and shower. The great, bare arms of the pachyderm were loaded with bangles of silver and glass, which jingled with a warlike sound as she hugged her little charge and plastered its pretty cheeks with great gurgling kisses, which made one shudder and think involuntarily of the “slime which the aspic leaves upon the caves of Nile.” Many of us have been Anglo-Indian babies. Was there a time when we suffered caresses such as these? What a happy thing it is that Lethe flows over us as we emerge from infancy, and blots out all that was before. Another question has been stirring in my mind since that scene. What feeling or motive prompted those luscious blandishments? Was it simple hypocrisy? I do not think so. The pure hypocrite is much rarer than shallow people think, and, in any case, there was no inducement to make a display in my presence. What influence could I possibly exercise over the fortunes of that great female? A maternal hippopotamus in the Zoo would as soon think of hugging a young giraffe to propitiate the spectators. Of course you may take up the position that the hypocrisy is practised all day before her mistress, and that the mere momentum of habit carries it on at other times. This is plausible, but I suspect that such a case would rather come under the fundamental law that action and reaction are equal and opposite. Let us be charitable and look for better reasons. The mere milk of human kindness explains something, but not enough, and I am inclined to think that the _Ayah_ is the subject of an indiscriminate maternal emotion, which runs where it can find a channel. The effect of culture is to specialise our affections and remove us further and further from the condition of the hen whose philoprogenitiveness embraces all chicks and ducklings; so it may well be that the poor _Ayah_, who has not had much culture, is better able than you or I to feel promiscuously parental towards babies in general, at least, if she can connect them in any way with herself. Towards babies in the care of another _Ayah_ she has no charity; they are the brood of a rival hen and she would like to exterminate them. Again, we must love and hate, if we live at all. The _Ayah’s_ horizon is not wide, her