I do not think, myself, that we shall have anything so pleasant as rain. The day is too dispirited for weeping; it will perform its appointed task and go to bed. I have not in months encountered a circumstance, an associate or a prescription so lowering as the present morning. Coming out as usual, quite prepared to be agreeable, it has given me the cold shoulder and the sulky nod. For two pins I would go back into the house and take every flower I could gather with me. Cometh the postman, advancing down the drive. Always an interest attaches to the postman; he is like to-morrow, you never know what he may bring, but he loses half his charm and all his dignity when deprived of his rat-tat-tat. Government makes up for it to some extent by dressing him in a red flannel coat with a leather belt and bare legs, but he can never acquire his proper and legitimate warning for the simple reason that the houses of this country have neither knockers nor bells. How sharply different are the ways in which people account for themselves in this world! It is one of the poignancies of life. This Punjabi postman earns his living by putting one foot before another--it comes to that--in the diverse interests of the community, and you never saw anybody look more profoundly bored with other people’s affairs. I earn mine--or would if it were not for Tiglath-Pileser--by looking carefully in the back of my head for foolish things to write about a garden. It is a method so much pleasanter that my compassion for the postman has a twinge of scruple in it for my lighter lot. That I had nothing in the world to do with the arrangement does not somehow make me quite happy about it--the fact is that to be logical is not always to be happy. I can only hope that if the postman and I meet again in the progress of eternity I shall find him composing poems. He has brought nothing to speak of, only the daily newspaper published at Lahore. That in itself is sufficiently curious, to live in a place where the morning paper is published at Lahore. Still stranger, to the western mind, may be the thought--of a journal produced in Allahabad. Allahabad, as a centre of journalistic enterprise, has the glamour of comic opera. Yet Allahabad has its newspaper, and they print it very nicely too. However, it would be ridiculous to write an essay upon Indian journalism merely because a Punjabi postman has brought in a newspaper.