‘Well,’ I said, ‘it is a wonderfully spirited, dashing thing, and the treatment of all that cane-brake and jungle grass is superb.’ ‘Ze treatment--pardon me, sir, I overboil--do you know which is ze Maharajah?’ ‘I can’t say I do.’ ‘Neider does he. Ze Maharajah refuse zat picture; he is a good fellow, too. He says it is a portrait of ze pig.’ ‘But it is so good,’ I protested, ‘of the pig.’ ‘But that does not interest the Maharajah, you onderstand, no. You see this one? Nawab of Kandore on his State elephant.’ No doubt about it,’ I said. ‘I know the Nawab well, the young scoundrel. How dignified he looks!’ There was a note of real sorrow in Kauffer’s voice. ‘Dignified? Oh, yes; dignified, but, you observe, also black. The Nawab will not be painted black. At once it is on my hands.’ ‘But he is black,’ I remonstrated. ‘He’s the darkest native I’ve ever seen among the nobility.’ ‘No matter for that. He will not be black. When I photograph that Nawab--any nawab--I do not him black make. But ziss ass of Armour--ach!’ It was a fascinating subject, and I could have pursued it all along the line of poor Armour’s rejected canvases, but the need to get away from Kauffer with his equal claim upon my sympathy was too great. To have cracked my solemn mask by a single smile would have been to break down irrepressibly, and never since I set foot in India had I felt a parallel desire to laugh and to weep. There was a pang in it which I recognize as impossible to convey, arising from the point of contact, almost unimaginable yet so clear before me, of the uncompromising ideals of the atelier and the naive demands of the Oriental, with an unhappy photographer caught between and wriggling. The situation was really monstrous, the fatuous rejection of all that fine scheming and exquisite manipulation, and it did not grow less so as Mr. Kauffer continued to unfold it. Armour had not, apparently, proceeded to the scene of his labours without instructions. In the pig-sticking delineation he had been specially told that the Maharajah and the pig were to be in the middle, with the rest nowhere and nothing between. Other injunctions were as clear, and as clearly disregarded. Armour, like the Maharajahs, had simply ‘REfuse’ to abandon his premeditated conceptions of how the thing should be done. And here was the result, for the laughter of the gods and anybody else that might see. I asked Kauffer unguardedly if no sort of pressure could be brought to bear upon these chaps to make them pay up. His face beaming with hope and intelligence, he suggested that I should approach the Foreign Office in his behalf; but this I could not quite see my way to. The coercion of native rulers, I explained, was a difficult and a dangerous art, and to insist, for example, that one of them should recognize his own complexion might be to run up a disproportionate little bill of our own. I did, however, compound something with Kauffer; I hope it wasn’t a felony. ‘Look here,’ I said