The fact that the highest officials in the country, having a large amount of hard work to do, should prefer to do it in an invigorating mountain atmosphere, rather than amid swamps, steam and fever in the plains below, is not, of course, surprising. The only matter of regret is that the obvious advantages, public and private, of an European climate for half the year can, from the nature of things, be enjoyed by so tiny a fraction of the official world. As it is, the annual removal of the Government to its summer quarters gives rise too often to a little outburst of unreasonable, though not unnatural jealousy; and Indian journalists, who are necessarily closely pinned to the plains, are never tired of inveighing against the 'Capua' of the British rule. The truth is, however, that if Hannibal's soldiers had worked half as hard at Capua as English officials do at Elysium, nothing but good could have resulted from their sojourn in that agreeable resting-place. Of the holiday-makers it may safely be said that, in nine cases out of ten, they have earned, by long months of monotonous, laborious, and often solitary life, a good right to all the refreshment of body and soul that a brief interval of cool breezes, new faces, and an amusing society can give them. The 'Jack' of the Civil Service is often a dull boy because the stern _régime_ of 'all work and no play' is too rigorously enforced upon him. Let no one therefore grudge him his few weeks of rest and merry-making, or mock at the profuse homage with which the goddess Terpsichore is adored by her modern votaries on the Himalayan heights. Elysium, indeed, enchants one on the first approach. You clamber for weary miles up a long, blazing ascent, where even the early morning sun seems to sting and pierce. As the road turns, you enter suddenly a sweet depth of shade formed by thick growths of ilex and rhododendron, from the breaks in which you look out at ease upon the blazing day beyond. Dotted all about the road, above and below, perched on every convenient rock or level ridge of soil, or sometimes built up on a framework of piles, are the homes of the Elysians; not, alas! the ideals which the imagination would conceive of the abodes of the blest, but seaside lodgings, of a by no means first-rate order, with precipices, clouds and rain, instead of sea. Presently the road fails at a great chasm in the mountain-side, and the horses' feet clatter over a frail-looking structure of planks and scaffolding, which clings to the mountain's edge. This is merely a landslip, an event too common even to be observed. Each heavy rainfall, however, washes an appreciable fraction of the Elysian summits to the depths below and leaves the craggy sides barer and steeper than ever. Then, emerging from the ilex grove, the traveller passes to a little Mall, where the fashionable world assembles for mutual edification, and the tide of life, business and gaiety flows fast and strong.