The ups and downs of life--Stirring adventures--Marching on to glory--Shooting in the tropics--Pepper-pot--With the _Rajah Sahib_--Goat-sacrifices at breakfast time--Simla to Cashmere--Manners and customs of Thibet--Burmah--No place to get fat in--Insects--Voracity of the natives--Snakes--Sport in the Jungle--Loaded for snipe, sure to meet tiger--With the gippos--No baked hedgehog--Cheap milk. The intelligent reader may have gathered from some of the foregoing pages that the experiences of the writer have been of a variegated nature. As an habitual follower of the Turf once observed: "When we're rich we rides in chaises, And when we're broke we walks like ----" Never mind what. It was an evil man who said it, but he was a philosopher. Dinner in the gilded saloon one day, on the next no dinner at all, and the key of the street. Such is life! Those experiences do not embrace a mortal combat with a "grizzly" in the Rockies, nor a tramp through a miasma-laden forest in Darkest Africa, with nothing better to eat than poisonous _fungi_, assorted grasses, red ants, and dwarfs; nor yet a bull fight. But they include roughing it in the bush, on underdone bread and scorched kangaroo, a tramp from Benares to the frontier of British India, another tramp or two some way beyond that frontier, a dreadful journey across the eternal snows of the Himalayas, a day's shooting in the Khyber Pass, a railway accident in Middlesex, a mad elephant (he had killed seven men, one of them blind) hunt at Thayet Myoo, in British Burmah, a fine snake anecdote or two, a night at Cambridge with an escaped lunatic, a tiger story (of course), and a capture for debt by an officer of the Sheriff of Pegu, with no other clothing on his body than a short jacket of gaily coloured silk, and a loin cloth. My life's history is never likely to be written--chiefly through sheer laziness on my own part, and the absence of the gambling instinct on that of the average publisher--but like the brown gentleman who smothered his wife, I have "seen things." In this chapter no allusion will be made to "up river" delights, the only idea of "camping out" which is properly understood by the majority of "up to date" young men and maidens; for this theme has been already treated, most comically and delightfully, by Mr. Jerome, in the funniest book I ever read. My own camping experiences have been for the most part in foreign lands, though I have seen the sun rise, whilst reclining beneath the Royal trees in St. James's Park; and as this book is supposed to deal with gastronomy, rather than adventure, a brief sketch of camp life must suffice.