n tea was ended, and
made cigarettes for her guests.

'This time last night,' said Scott, 'we didn't expect--er--this kind
of thing, did we?'

'I've learned to expect anything,' said William. 'You know, in our
service, we live at the end of the telegraph; but, of course, this
ought to be a good thing for us all, departmentally--if we live.'

'It knocks us out of the running in our own Province,' Scott replied,
with equal gravity. 'I hoped to be put on the Luni Protective Works
this cold weather; but there's no saying how long the famine may keep
us.'

'Hardly beyond October I should think,' said Martyn. 'It will be
ended, one way or the other, then.'

'And we've nearly a week of this,' said William. 'Sha'n't we be dusty
when it's over?'

For a night and a day they knew their surroundings; and for a night
and a day, skirting the edge of the great Indian Desert on a
narrow-gauge line, they remembered how in the days of their
apprenticeship they had come by that road from Bombay. Then the
languages in which the names of the stations were written changed,
and they launched south into a foreign land, where the very
smells were new. Many long and heavily-laden grain trains were in
front of them, and they could feel the hand of Jimmy Hawkins from
far off. They waited in extemporised sidings blocked by processions
of empty trucks returning to the north, and were coupled on to
slow, crawling trains, and dropped at midnight, Heaven knew where;
but it was furiously hot; and they walked to and fro among sacks,
and dogs howled.

Then they came to an India more strange to them than to the
untravelled Englishman--the flat, red India of palm-tree,
palmyra-palm, and rice, the India of the picture-books, of _Little
Henry and His Bearer_--all dead and dry in the baking heat. They had
left the incessant passenger-traffic of the north and west far and
far behind them. Here the people crawled to the side of the train,
holding their little ones in their arms; and a loaded truck would
be left behind, men and women clustering round and above it like ants
by spilled honey. Once in the twilight they saw on a dusty plain a
regiment of little brown men, each bearing a body over his shoulder;
and when the train stopped to leave yet another truck, they perceived
that the burdens were not corpses, but only foodless folk picked up
beside their dead oxen by a corps of Irregular troops. Now they met
more white men, here one and there two, w