LIFE IN A POST: TRUE
HOSPITALITY: A BHUTYA PONY 165

XXII. THE SIGNING OF THE TREATY 181

XXIII. BACK TO INDIA 189

* * * * *

LHASSA. (From a photograph) _Frontispiece_
_By permission from 'Black and White'_

TO LHASSA AT LAST

CHAPTER I

THE WRITING ON THE WALL

'Ain't this ripping?' said I to my wife.

'Yes, delightful,' she said.

It really was rather nice. It had been quite hot in the plains, and was
pleasantly cool up here. My wife and family had preceded me and had been
settled for some weeks in the house which we had taken in the hills for
the hot weather, and now I had just arrived on two months' leave. We
were sitting over the fire in the drawing-room after dinner, a cosy
little room made homelike by a careful selection of draperies and
ornaments from the larger drawing-room in the plains.

'Just ripping,' I repeated with sad lack of originality. The ride up the
hill from the plains had been fatiguing. The fire was soporific. There
was whiskey and soda at my elbow and a cheroot in my mouth (I'm a
privileged husband and smoke in the drawing-room).

'Ripping,' I said for the third time, half dozing.

'Come, get up, lazy-bones, and go to bed. You are hopeless as you are.'

So I was led to bed. We put out the lamps, and on the hall table found
our bedroom candles, which we lit preparatory to climbing the stairs.
The staircase set me musing. Some hill houses have them, but they are
rare in the plains. The smallness of the rooms, the existence of that
narrow staircase, the domestic process of lighting the bedroom candles,
the necessity of not waking the baby, the sense of security and of
being cut adrift even temporarily from the ties of officialdom--all
suggested the peaceful conditions of life enjoyed by the small but solid
householder at home.

'We've got it at last,' I exclaimed.

'Got what?' asked my wife.

'Why, the life of the bank clerk at home,' I replied; 'that bank clerk
whom we have always envied, who lives at Tooting in a little house just
like this, with a creaking staircase just like this, who never gets
harried from pillar to post, who is peaceful and domestic, and gets fat
as soon as he can afford to. And here I am, for two months at any rate,
and I'm living in a Tooting villa just like the bank clerk, and in the
bosom of my family, and I'm go