These Indian festivities are, perhaps, none the less festive, and certainly the more touching, for the fact that at least half the holiday-makers have a dark, sad corner in their hearts which has to be hidden from the world's eye and to be ignored in the common intercourse of life. Separation is the dark cloud which hangs over an Indian existence: husbands and wives, mothers and children, forced asunder, perhaps at the very time when union is most delightful, and living (how maimed and sad a life!) in the absence of all that is best-beloved. They put a brave face upon it, but the heartache is there all the same. What a strong pulse of love and tenderness and sorrow goes throbbing week by week across half the world from the wives and children at home to the lonely exile, struggling bravely with his fate in the far-off Indian station: what dear, ill-spelt, round-hand, stupid letters, which yet are wept over with such passionate pleasure and treasured with such pious care! People have a cheap tariff for telegraphing back to India their safe arrival in England, with a rupee extra for saying that the traveller 'is better.' What a story it tells of anxious men in India toiling over work, with their hearts far away with the shattered, invalid lady or flickering child's life, carried away to cool regions in hopes of saving it! Take, for instance, little Major Storks, who was stage-manager for the Vernons' theatricals and sang a comic song between the acts. He is a grizzly, wizen, well-tanned, wiry little fellow, but has, under that rough exterior, as brave and tender a heart as ever beat. He is in charge of the Rumble Chunder Canal and bestows on it all a lover's assiduity: for it he thinks, he writes, he plans, he labours early and late: he rides about in the most demented fashion until the sun has dried him up into a perfect mummy. He knows the Canal's ways and manners--how much water it ought to pour per second; how much it _does_ pour; which of the bridges are infirm; where the silt is accumulating; where the water is being wasted or stolen. He drives his subordinates frantic by a zeal in which they cannot participate and a thoroughness which they cannot shirk. To the world outside he seems the merest drudge. To-day, however, he is in paradise. It is Christmas morning and the mail has brought him a goodly budget of letters, all redolent of home and tender conjugal love, and--precious alleviation of exile--photographs of half-a-dozen little Storks. He sits now, with all his family before him, with tears of joyful satisfaction in his eyes. What comely lads! what sweet, ingenuous little girls! what dear, familiar looks, the legacy of a youth that has passed away, greeting him from every little portrait! In a moment Storks' soul quits its shabby tenement of clay and its hot surroundings, and is away in England with wife and children--the wife, whose heart has ached for many a dreary