These excellent people, to the greater part of whom the world consisted of India and Edinburgh, whose associations were all connected either with the kindly and limited circle of home, or with the _bizarre_ and extraordinary life of the East, and to whom the rest of the world came in by the way, a sort of unconsidered blank of distance between the two points of interest, were as original and agreeable a community as one could wish to meet with; experienced, for years of travel, of intercourse with primitive people, and of universal command and authority, had given a certain decision and authority to their judgment; yet so singularly simple in respect to this European world and its centres of civilisation, and so innocent of all public sentiment other than the dominant Anglo-Saxon instinct of sway and rule over an inferior race, that their views on general subjects had a freshness and novelty which, if sometimes a little amusing, was always racy and original. Knowing very little, except in words, of the races who contest with us the supremacy of the modern world; of those powers so equally balanced whose slightest move on either side sets all the kingdoms of Christendom astir, and threatens contests bigger and more ominous than any conquering campaign of the East; this community was good-humouredly contemptuous of the incomprehensible ignorance of those dwellers at home who knew no difference between Tamul and Hindostani, who innocently imagined that a man at Agra, being in the same country with his brother at Madras, might have a chance of meeting with him some day, or who could not be made to comprehend the difference between a Dhobi and a man of high caste. These strange ignorances they laughed at among themselves with a pleasant feeling of superiority, and contested Indian appointments and the new regulations of the Company with far greater interest than the state of Europe could excite them into. One and another had charge of a little troop of children, "sent home" for their education. Somebody was always returning, somebody always "going out." There was great talk, especially among the ladies, of outfits and their comparative cheapness, and of the respective advantages and disadvantages in travelling overland or by the Cape. Sir John, who was Indian enough to find himself much at home in this society, was at the same time man of the world enough to be amused by its characteristics. He found it more entertaining to listen to a lady's troubles in a journey to the hills, to the adventures of the dàkh, or the misbehaviour of the Syces, than he had found it in recent days to bewail the afflictions of a continental tour, the impositions of the inns, and the failure of the cooks. Palanquins and howdahs were unquestionably more picturesque than travelling carriages and _vetturini_, and the Dakh Bungalow ten times more original than the _Hôtel d'Angleterre_ or the _Römische Kaiser_. Sir John, for the moment, found himself so famously