even but large elliptical path. If a bird flies in a circle he either tends to swing to the centre of that circle or away from it. Now the hawk missed their intention and tended toward the centre, making a small circle inside their big one. No sooner was his back turned to them than the three pigeons made another dive, almost to our roof, but the sinister one was not to be deterred. He followed like a tongue of black lightning. His prey made a curving dive on to the roof, where they were safe at last under my wide-spread arms! That instant I heard the shriek of the wind in the air; about a foot above my head flew by the hawk, his eyes blazing with yellow fire and his claws quivering like the tongue of a viper. As he passed I could hear the wind still whistling in his feathers. After that narrow escape of my pet birds, I began to train Gay-Neck to a sense of direction. One day I took all three birds in a cage towards the east of our town. Exactly at nine in the morning I set them free. They came home safely. The next day I took them an equal distance to the west. Inside of a week they knew the way to our house from within a radius of at least fifteen miles in any direction. Since nothing ends smoothly in this world, the training of Gay-Neck finally met with a check. I had taken him and his parents down the Ganges in a boat. When we started it was about six in the morning. The sky was littered with stray clouds, and a moderate wind was blowing from the south. Our boat was piled high with rice white as snow on whose top were heaped mangoes red and golden in colour, like a white peak afire with the sunset. I should have foreseen that such auspicious weather might turn suddenly into a terrible storm, for after all, boy though I was, I knew something about the freaks of the monsoon in June.