The jungle triumphs in the rains; it overwhelms the place. Even on the shelf it is hard enough to cope with, creeping up, licking and lipping the garden through the paling; but out upon the public khud-sides it is unchecked and insatiable. We hate the jungle; it is so patient and designing and unremitting, so much stronger than we are. Such constant war we have to make upon it merely to prevent it from swallowing us alive. It will plant a toadstool in your bedroom and a tree in your roof; it shrinks from nothing. That is why we hear newcomers from tidy England in rapture upon the glorious freedom of the wilderness with grim displeasure; and point to the crooked squares of our pathetic little estates, painfully redeemed and set smugly about with posies, saying “Admire _that_!” And it is so demoralizing, the jungle. The oak, for instance, at home, is a venerable person we all respect and some of us used to worship. Here he is a disreputable old Bacchus with an untrimmed beard and ferns sticking to his branches. Certain English flowers even, alas that I should say it! have left the paths of propriety and taken permanently to unregulated living. The dahlia has never repented, and the tiger-lilies brazen it out, but the little blue face of a convolvulus I met this morning, strayed away in the company of a snake-plant and a young rhododendron, said with wistful plainness, “I was a virtuous flower once!” Everything is still very damp, and in the shade very chill, and we were glad enough to escape the cloud that suddenly sobered the highway just as we turned in upon the shelf. A figure moved along the road in the greyness, came closer, making automatic movements of head and hands, passed us--a coolie eating a cucumber. It was a long and thick cucumber, and he was eating the rind and the seeds, everything. It seemed a cold, unsuitable, injudicious thing for even a coolie to eat in the rain. We hoped it was vicious indulgence, but we feared it was his breakfast. CHAPTER XVIII