that Mrs. Hichens Home; and that
had been quite out of the question. But the Western Ghat mountains
furnish a very good barricade against Bombay fever. (Devoutly inclined
persons have even intimated that they were specially placed there for
the convenience of men who are much attached to their homes.)

Extending a thousand miles parallel with the coast, from five to forty
miles inland, built mostly of pinnacles and peaks rising a few hundred
or a few thousand feet from near sea level, more rugged than any
mountains of their size in the world, the Western Ghats are like a
section of Himalaya in miniature. The railway line up has a
reversing-station proclaimed far and wide to be the most splendid piece
of railway engineering on earth. (That there are several more splendid
in the Rocky Mountains is unimportant.)

Just over the top, about seventy miles from Bombay, is Khandalla and
Lanowli and further on, Poona. Poona is a military station, sometimes
too far. Lanowli is a railway station--which means that no one lives
there who is fit to associate with a police commissioner's wife. But
Khandalla is no station at all, being only a small mountain village
with three or four abandoned bungalows far apart from each other.
Heaven knows who built them in the beginning, but whoever it was, they
must have done it too late, because there is a neglected grave or two
near each one.

The native agents got in every good argument for the bungalows, but
Police Commissioner Hichens was not persuaded. He seemed to have a
constitutional antipathy to those bungalows.

No, the bungalows might be safer and dryer and warmer at night; they
might be cleaner and healthier and more comfortable all the time; but
he wanted a tent and he meant to put it where he wanted it. So, at
great expense of time and labour on the part of natives, but very
little expenditure of money on his part, he succeeded in hoisting a
tent from Bombay to the top of the Western Ghat mountains, of a size
and of an age and of a strength which suggested a military mess-camp.

The tent was set up in the Jungle at the edge of Khandalla. The
servants would find quarters in Khandalla village; a cook, a cook's
servant-boy and a butler for the entire household; a boy for the small
son, an ayah for the wee girl and a very expensive ayah for the lady
herself.

If an ayah is expensive enough, she is usually a very intelligent
person, thoroughly informed on most general su