The world into which I have tumbled is peopled with strange beings. They are always busy erecting walls and rules round themselves, and how careful they are with their curtains lest they should see! It is a wonder to me they have not made drab covers for flowering plants and put up a canopy to ward off the moon. If the next life is determined by the desires of this, then I should be reborn from our enshrouded planet into some free and open realm of joy. Only those who cannot steep themselves in beauty to the full, despise it as an object of the senses. But those who have tasted of its inexpressibility know how far it is beyond the highest powers of mere eye or ear--nay, even the heart is powerless to attain the end of its yearning. _P.S._--I have left out the very thing I started to tell of. Don't be afraid, it won't take four more sheets. It is this, that on the evening of the first day of _Asarh_ it came on to rain very heavily, in great lance-like showers. That is all. ON THE WAY TO GOALUNDA, _21st June 1892._ Pictures in an endless variety, of sand-banks, fields and their crops, and villages, glide into view on either hand--of clouds floating in the sky, of colours blossoming when day meets night. Boats steal by, fishermen catch fish; the waters make liquid, caressing sounds throughout the livelong day; their broad expanse calms down in the evening stillness, like a child lulled to sleep, over whom all the stars in the boundless sky keep watch--then, as I sit up on wakeful nights, with sleeping banks on either side, the silence is broken only by an occasional cry of a jackal in the woods near some village, or by fragments undermined by the keen current of the Padma, that tumble from the high cliff-like bank into the water. Not that the prospect is always of particular interest--a yellowish sandbank, innocent of grass or tree, stretches away; an empty boat is tied to its edge; the bluish water, of the same shade as the hazy sky, flows past; yet I cannot tell how it moves me. I suspect that the old desires and longings of my servant-ridden childhood--when in the solitary imprisonment of my room I pored over the _Arabian Nights_, and shared with Sinbad the Sailor his adventures in many a strange land--are not yet dead within me, but are roused at the sight of any empty boat tied to a sand-bank. If I had not heard fairy tales and read the _Arabian Nights_ and _Robinson Crusoe_ in childhood, I am sure views of distant banks, or the farther side of wide fields, would not have stirred me so--the whole world, in fact, would have had for me a different appeal. What a maze of fancy and fact becomes tangled up within the mind of man! The different strands--petty and great--of story and event and picture, how they get knotted together! SHELIDAH, _22nd June 1892._