And now comes Texakharna with its sweltering Zanzibar heat, but an admirable supper to put us into good humour, and a beautiful moonlight to sit and smoke in. If the sunset was weird, the moonlight was positively goblinish. Such gloom! Not darkness remember, but gloom, blacker than darkness, and yet never absolutely impenetrable. At least so it seemed, and the fire-flies, flickering in thousands above the undergrowth and up among the invisible branches, helped the fancy. And the frogs! Was there ever, even in India in "the rains," such a prodigious chorus of batrachians? And the katydids! Surely they were all gone mad together. But it was a delightful ride. Sometimes in the clearings we caught glimpses of negro parties, the white dresses of the women glancing in and out along the paths, and the sound of singing coming from the huts in the corners of the maize-patches. Here at the corner of a clearing stands a cottage, a regular fairy-tale cottage "by the wood," and in the moonlight it looked as if, "really and truly," the walls were made of toffy and the roof was plum-cake. At any rate there were great pumpkins on the roof, just such pumpkins as those in which Cinderella (after they had turned into coaches) drove to the Prince's ball. And I would bet my last dollar on it that the lizards that turned into horses were there too, and the rats, and in the marsh close by you might have a large choice of frogs to change into coachmen. And yet, I cannot help thinking, there is a good deal of false sentiment expended upon the moon, the result of a demoralizing humility which science has taught the inhabitants of "the planet we call Earth." We are for ever being warned by our teachers against the sin of pride, and being told that the universe is full of "Earths" just as good as ours, and perhaps better. We are not, they say, to fancy that our own world is something very special, for it is only a little ball, spinning round and round in the firmament, among a number of other balls which are so superior to it that if our own insignificant orange came in contact with them we should get the worst of the collision. Nor are we to fancy that the moon is our private property, and grumble at her shabbiness, as our planetary betters have a superior claim to their share of her, and this sphere of ours ought to be very thankful for as much of the luminary as it gets.