The Englishman lay out at high noon on the crest of a rolling upland crowned with rock, and heard, as a loafer had told him he would hear, the “set of the day,” which is as easily discernible as the change of tone between the rising and the falling tide. At a certain hour the impetus of the morning dies out, and all things, living and inanimate, turn their thoughts to the prophecy of the coming night. The little wandering breezes drop for a time, and, when they blow afresh, bring the message. The “set of the day” as the loafer said, has changed, the machinery is beginning to run down, the unseen tides of the air are falling. The moment of the change can only be felt in the open and in touch with the earth, and once discovered, seem to place the finder in deep accord and fellowship with all things on the earth. Perhaps this is why the genuine loafer, though “frequently drunk,” is “always polite to the stranger,” and shows such a genial tolerance towards the weaknesses of mankind, black, white, or brown. In the evening when the jackals were scuttling across the roads and the cranes had gone to roost, came Deoli the desolate, and an unpleasant meeting. Six days away from his kind had bred in a Cockney heart a great desire to see an Englishman again. An elaborate loaf through the cantonment--fifteen minutes’ walk from end to end--showed only one distant dog-cart and a small English child with an ayah. There was grass in the soldierly-straight roads, and some of the cross-cuts had never been used at all from the days when the cantonment had been first laid out. In the western corner lay the cemetery--the only carefully-tended and newly-whitewashed thing in this God-forgotten place. Some years ago a man had said good-bye to the Englishman; adding cheerily:--“We shall meet again. The world’s a very little place y’know.” His prophecy was a true one, for the two met indeed, but the prophet was lying in Deoli Cemetery near the well, which is decorated so ecclesiastically with funeral urns. Truly the world is a _very_ little place that a man should so stumble upon dead acquaintances when he goes abroad. THE LAST. _Comes back to the Railway, after Reflections on the Management of the Empire; and so Home again, with apology to all who have read thus far._