Leaving the celestials to their business and pleasures in the upper regions, the Historic Muse must now descend into the plains and record the wrath of Blunt and the more than Homeric combats which, stirred by Até in her most malignant mood, that irrepressible official waged against his luckless compeers at the Board. The outbreak was horribly inopportune. The weather was becoming disagreeably hot; Cockshaw was looking up his rifles and fishing-rods for a month's run into Cashmir; Fotheringham was preparing to retire behind his cuscus entrenchments and æstivate in placidity till the moment arrived for going to the Hills. But the black soul of Blunt was impervious to climatic influences; his craving for information became more insatiable, his contempt for Fotheringham's platitudes and Strutt's tall writing less and less disguised. The further Blunt looked into the Rumble Chunder affair the keener grew his sense of the feeble, roundabout, inaccurate, unthorough way in which it had been treated by every one who had essayed to take it in hand. 'The way to handle nettles,' he said, roughly, 'is to take tight hold of them and bear what stinging you get and have done with it.' Neither Fotheringham nor Cockshaw were in the least disposed to handle official nettles or to admit the force of Blunt's logic as applied to themselves. 'Some nettles,' Fotheringham said, with dignified composure, 'will not bear handling at all. Many of our Indian maladies you will find, Blunt, require a course of treatment always unpopular with ardent physicians, that, namely, of being left alone.' 'Ay,' said Cockshaw, blowing a great stream of smoke from his mouth, as if he wished he could treat Blunt and his schemes in like fashion; 'leave well alone, Blunt. What the deuce is it you are driving at?' 'I'll tell you what I am driving at,' said Blunt, 'I want to be out of the muddle in which we have been going on all these years, just for want of a little explicitness and courage.' 'Excuse me,' said Fotheringham testily; 'I am not aware that the conquerors and administrators of the Sandy Tracts have ever been accused of deficiency in courage, at any rate.' 'Of course not,' answered the other; 'no one supposes anything of the sort; but what I mean is that no one has faced the consequences of that confounded Proclamation of the Governor-General in a plain, business-like way, and seen what it really comes to.'