"My dear sir," began the Archdeacon pompously, but the jobber interrupted him. He had had a number of whiskies and sodas, and was quite heated. "It's very easy to sneer: it doesn't mean because you've lived a few years in a place..." "I? Thirty. But they--seven thousand at least." "I say, it doesn't mean because you've lived thirty years in a place that you know all about it. Ramisram, or whatever the damned place is called, I've never heard of it and don't want to. You do, that's part of your job, I expect. But I read the papers, I've read books too, mind you, about India. I know what's going on. One knows enough--enough--data: East and West and the difference: I can form an opinion--I've a right to it even if I've never heard of Ramis what d'you call it. You've lived there and you can't see the wood for the trees. We see it because we're out of it--see it at a distance." "Perhaps," said the Archdeacon "there's a little misunderstanding. The discussion--if I may say so--is getting a little heated--unnecessarily, I think. We hold our views. This gentleman has lived in the country. He holds others. I'm sure it would be most interesting to hear them. But I confess I didn't quite gather them from what he said." The little man was silent: he sat back, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. Then he smiled: "I won't give you views," he said. "But if you like I'll give you what you call details, things seen, facts. Then you can give me _your_ views on 'em." They murmured approval. "Let's see, it's fifteen, seventeen years ago. I had a district then about as big as England. There may have been twenty Europeans in it, counting the missionaries, and twenty million Tamils and Telegus. I expect nineteen millions of the Tamils and Telegus never saw a white man from one year's end to the other, or if they did, they caught a glimpse of me under a sun helmet riding through their village on a fleabitten grey Indian mare. Well, Providence had so designed it that there was a stretch of coast in that district which was a barren wilderness of sand and scrubby thorn jungle--and nothing else--for three hundred miles; no towns, no villages, no water, just sand and trees for three hundred miles. O, and sun, I forgot that, blazing sun. And in the water off the shore at one place there were oysters, millions of them lying and breeding at the bottom, four or five fathoms down. And in the oysters, or some of them, were pearls."