When I reached Orissa, the first sign I saw of the calamity was a band of thirty or forty brown skeletons crawling towards me as I stood in a garden at Cuttack. They said they had walked from their ruined homes beside the Brahmani, looking for work or food, and hundreds were wandering over the country in the same way, even as far as Calcutta, which they counted a fortnight’s walk from there. Probably they had heard of my arrival, and collected in the vague hope of some kind of assistance, or perhaps simply from the instinct that makes most people fling their misery before any human being for sympathy. Very likely some were habitual beggars, worn thin by man’s want of charity, and taking the advantage of extra numbers to impress me. A man of stone would have been impressed. There is no need to describe a brown skeleton—the projecting ribs and spiny backbone, the legs and arms like withered sticks, the deep pits at the collarbones, the loose and crinkly skin. But when a party of brown skeletons fling themselves flat on the ground before you, with arms outstretched beyond their heads and faces rubbing in the dust, when they take your feet in their bones and lay their skulls upon your boots, what are you to do? What are you to do when there are fifteen hundred men, women, and children only waiting to catch sight of you that they may make the same irresistible and hopeless appeal? I went to the officials. The Collector, under whose immediate charge the problem of relief came, was away, but I had a long interview with the Commissioner in his beautiful home, built on an ancient stone embankment that protects the town from the river, then hardly visible in the wide expanse of sand. In the case of both officials I observed the same difficulties that I found in official life wherever I came across it in India. Both I believe to have been entirely honourable and conscientious men, devoted to their rather monotonous but responsible work, from which they could gain no great glory beyond the usual steps of promotion, ending in retirement to the obscurity of some English golf-links. One of them, as I heard afterwards, had a high reputation among his colleagues in the Service for his solicitude on behalf of the people under his charge. He studied their language and customs with enthusiasm, and on one occasion had displayed conspicuous gallantry in defending them from a gang of pillaging outlaws, whom he captured single-handed. Yet he was not the more popular of the two; and though both were, I think, rather exceptional public servants, they were regarded with more hostility than veneration. The curse of ordinary officials is that reform means change, and change means trouble. But a conscientious official has the further curse that, under the constant pressure of work, he is compelled to spend most of his time among papers, statistics, and abstractions. To preserve his sanity under these conditions,