The ponies went excitedly this morning, as they always do after a storm like the one we had last night. “Ridiculous animal,” said I to Arabi as he paused to look askance at a small boulder that had slipped down the khud. “This is the same old road you travelled many yesterdays and will travel many to-morrows. Foolish beast, of what are you afraid?” Tiglath-Pileser reproved me. “To us,” said he, “it is the same old road, but to a really observant person like Arabi it presents fifty significant changes. He in his stable listened to the rain last night with emotions quite different from yours in your bed. To him it meant that the young grass was everywhere springing and the turf everywhere softening under foot, and no doubt he reflected once more upon the insoluble problem presented by heel-ropes and your meals in a trough. This morning his experienced eye discovers all he expected and more,--puddles, channels, and other suspicious circumstances. That stone was not there yesterday, no doubt a wild beast had unearthed it and was sitting behind it as we passed, waiting for just such a breakfast as Arabi knows he comprises. That the wild beast didn’t happen to be there on this occasion was great luck for Arabi and you can see he is relieved.” “Well,” said I, unsympathetic, “I think a good deal of it is nonsense all the same,” and as we approached the next lurking lion I gave Arabi a sound cuff that drew off his attention and he cantered past it without a word. The familiar road wound round our own hill, the Roy-Regent’s hill crowned with his castle, and Summer Hill. It would be entertaining to be as observant as Arabi and find wonders round every curve; we come far short of that and sometimes confess the great book of nature before us a little dull for lack of the writing of man. It is possible that mountains may suggest mere altitude, especially mountains like the Himalayas, wall behind wall, waves transfixed in long unbroken lines against the sky; one cannot always feel a passion of admiration for mere matter at an inconvenient level. But their new mood of the rains makes them beautiful, almost interesting. The mist rises among them and turns them cleverly into the peaks and masses they ought to be, and a slope flashes in the brilliant sun and a ravine sinks in the purple shade, and the barest shoulder is cloaked in green velvet. “They would give a good deal to see _that_ from the Row,” I say boastfully, and Tiglath-Pileser responds “Yes indeed,” and we both look at it as if we were the proprietors, momentarily almost inclined to admit it as a compensation.