“Humph,” said Ram Baksh, “I knew you were not a Padre Sahib.” The little mishap was patched up with string, and the tonga went on merrily. It is Stevenson who says that the “invitation to the road,” nature’s great morning song, has not yet been properly understood or put to music. The first note of it is the sound of the dawn-wind through long grass, and the last, in this country, the creaking of the bullock wains getting under way in some unseen _serai_. It is good, good beyond expression, to see the sun rise upon a strange land and to know that you have only to go forward and possess that land--that it will dower you before the day is ended with a hundred new impressions and, perhaps, one idea. It is good to snuff the wind when it comes in over grassy uplands or down from the tops of the blue Aravalis--dry and keen as a new-ground sword. Best of all is to light the First Pipe--is there any tobacco so good as that we burn in honour of the breaking day?--and, while the ponies wake the long white road with their hooves and the birds go abroad in companies together, to thank your stars that you are neither the Subaltern who has Orderly Room, the ’Stunt who has _kacherri_, or the Judge who has Court to attend; but are only a loafer in a flannel shirt, bound, if God please, to “Little Boondi,” somewhere beyond the faint hills across the plain. But there was alloy in this delight. Men had told the Englishman darkly that Boondi State had no love for Englishmen, that there was nowhere to stop, and that no one would do anything for money. Love was out of the question. Further, it was an acknowledged fact that there were no Englishmen of any kind in Boondi. But the Englishman trusted that Ganesh would be good to him, and that he would, somehow or other, fall upon his feet as he had fallen before. The road from Nasirabad to Deoli, being military in its nature, is nearly as straight as a ruler and about as smooth. It runs for the most part through “Arthurian” country, just such a land as the Knights of the Round Table went a-looting in--is gently sloping pasture ground, where a man could see his enemy a long way off and “ride a wallop” at him, as the Morte D’Arthur puts it, of a clear half mile. Here and there little rocky hills, the last off-shoots of the Aravalis to the west, break the ground; but the bulk of it is fair and without pimples. The Deoli Force are apparently so utterly Irregular that they can do without a telegraph, have their mails carried by runners, and dispense with bridges over all the fifty-six miles that separate them from Nasirabad. However, a man who goes shikarring for any length of time in one of Ram Baksh’s tongas would soon learn to dispense with anything and everything. “All the Sahibs use my tongas; I’ve got eight of them and twenty pairs of horses,” said Ram Baksh. “They go as far as Gangra, where the tigers are, for they are ‘shutin-tongas.’” Now the Englishman knew Gangra slightly, having seen it on the way to