case, very strange, the like they had never seen in all their experience of years, all skin and bones, not a particle of meat; very strange.” So said we all of us, “a very strange case.” After his weeks of diagnosing and cognising the vet departed with his pockets full of rupees. Besides, he made quite a reputation, for he sent a long account of this very strange case to a horsey journal. A deluge of letters came, everybody had his theory or opinion, until the editor, buried under the accumulation of papers, said that the discussion must stop. At last the Government got to hear of it. Why is it that Government takes such a long time to hear? Is it on account of the length of its ears, the distance anything has to travel to get into its head? It had a long investigation by a committee of fifteen, all titled, distinguished—nobody knows anything but this class—and as each had to have his talk printed, the result was a voluminous book, of which a thousand copies were published, costing many times more than the horses were worth, not to mention the expense of the committee, for such men are always good livers. Of these thousand copies only twenty-five were used. Each member of the committee took a copy to show his wife and friends, and ten were sent to editors. A Government subsidized paper declared that the book reflected great credit on the distinguished committee, that it was just what the public might have expected from the well known reputation of the members selected with such great care and excellent judgment by His Excellency, the Viceroy. An opposition paper, reviewing the book, said that the committee was a ponderous one, in number, in titles, in its expenses; the report was ponderous in its size and weight, in the number of its pages and sections, and in its cost. The subject of the investigation, to begin with, was of no consequence, the quiet death of three probably worn-out old hacks in a little up-country, out of the way station. There was not a thought in the book worth preserving, the style was verbose, flatulent to a degree, as if the committee had been appointed wholly and solely to make a book. “Without wasting any more of our valuable space on nothing, we give it as from our profound conviction that a mosquito might take in every idea in the whole book and then not be conscious of any enlargement of its brain.” A babu tried his copy, but declared it was too much for him, as “it made him sick in his mind to read it.” The only real benefit from the book was what the paper-maker, the printer and the waste paper dealer received. The whole committee decided unanimously that the horses had died, and as everybody agreed with them, the subject was dropped and forgotten by the public.