Everything went on smoothly and monotonously enough till I was within twenty miles, roughly computed, of Ghazeepore. At this point, on reaching the end of a stage, my bearers woke me to say there was no relay waiting for them. It may have been midnight. I told them to set me down, to make up a fire and to go to sleep around it, but keeping watch, turn and turn about, each for an hour. Matters being thus disposed, I shut and hooked the palanquin doors, readjusting my blankets, and was soon dreaming of another hemisphere. At sunrise no new bearers had yet shown themselves. My men belonged to the region we were in, and I learned from them that the nearest European dwelt only eight miles distant. I bargained with them to take me to his bungalow. The unexpected wages which they were promised being liberal, they trotted off with unwonted briskness. In due course the bungalow loomed in sight, and as I approached it a burly figure, in shirt-sleeves and with arms akimbo, appeared in the verandah, his eyes turned in the direction of his unlooked-for visitor. "God bless you, Hugh Maxwell! I'm devilish glad to see you," shouted the burly figure, benedictory, but even in benediction not oblivious of the Old Teaser. "I wish to Goodness I was Hugh Maxwell!" I returned, stepping to the ground. "Oh, never mind," rejoined the hearty indigo-planter, perceiving his mistake and offering me his hand. "There is just time for a bath before breakfast," he added; and a good tubbing, in sufficient light to see and evade creeping things by, was far from unacceptable. I stayed with my good-natured host two days and nights, picking up, in the mean while, much curious information touching the cultivation and manufacture in which he was occupied. Like most persons of his calling, he was an ardent sportsman. The early hours of the morning he gave almost daily to a stroll with his gun; and the first evening I passed with him he invited me, in startlingly piebald phraseology, to accompany him on the morrow. "Be up by _top dage_," said he: "we will have _chhotî hâzirî_, and then a _chal_ over the _khets_ for some _shikâr_" Why he did not prefer to say "gun-fire," "tea and toast," "run," "fields," and "game," probably he could not have told himself. His way of peppering his English with Urdû was characteristic of his class, and till I got accustomed to it I found it somewhat perplexing. If he had known me all his life he could not have been more friendly. Yet his kindness and hospitality were not exceptional things in the India of a quarter of a century ago. All is changed there now--whether much for the better I am skeptical. Twenty-two hours after they were due my missing bearers made their appearance. Arrived at Ghazeepore, I addressed a complaint to the postmaster-general. Thereupon two sides of a large sheet of paper were spread for me with base official circumlocution, through the darkness of which I groped out, after some