“A twenty-five per cent. reduction all roun’ an’ no certain leave when you wants it. _Of_ course the best men goes somewhere else. That’s only natural, and ’eres this sanguinary down mail a stickin’ in the eye of the Khundwa down! I tell you, Sir, India’s a bad place--a very bad place. ’Tisn’t what it was when I came out one and thirty years ago, an’ the drivers was getting their seven and eight ’undred rupees a month an’ was treated as _men_.” The Englishman was on his way to Nasirabad, and a gentleman in the Railway was explaining to him the real reason of the decadence of the Empire. It was because the Rajputana-Malwa Railway had cut all its employes twenty-five per cent. And, in truth, there is a good deal of fine free language where gentlemen in the carriage department, foremen-fitters, station and assistant stationmasters do foregather. It is ungenerous to judge a caste by a few samples; but the Englishman had on the road and elsewhere seen a good deal of gentlemen on the Railway, and is prepared to write down here that they spend their pay in a manner that would do credit to an income of a thousand a month. Now they are saying that the twenty-five per cent. reduction is depriving them of the pleasures of life. So much the better if it makes them moderately economical in their expenditure. Revolving these things in his mind, together with one or two stories of extravagance not quite fit for publication, the Englishman came to Nasirabad, before sunrise, and there to a tonga. Imagine an icy pause of several minutes followed by language. Quoth Ram Baksh, proprietor, driver, _sais_, and everything else, calmly:--“At this time of the year and having regard to the heat of the sun who wants a top to a tonga? I have no top. I have a top, but it would take till twelve o’clock to put it on. And behold, Sahib, Padre Martum Sahib went in this tonga to Deoli. All the officer Sahibs of Deoli and Nasirabad go in this tonga, for _shikar_. This is a ‘shutin-tonga!’” When Church and Army are brought against one, argument is in vain. But to take a soft, office-bred unfortunate into the wilderness, upon a skeleton, a diagram of a conveyance, is brutality. Ram Baksh did not see it, and headed his two thirteen-hand rats straight towards the morning sun, along a beautiful military road. “We shall get to Deoli in six hours,” said Ram Baksh the boastful, and, even as he spoke, the spring of the tonga bar snapt “mit a harp-like melodious twang.” “What does it matter?” said Ram Baksh. “Has the Sahib never seen a tonga-iron break before? Padre Martum Sahib and all the officer Sahibs in Deoli"--“Ram Baksh,” said the Englishman sternly, “I am not a Padre Sahib nor an officer Sahib, and if you say anything more about Padre Martum Sahib or the officers in Deoli I shall grow very angry, and beat you with a stick, Ram Baksh.”