-valued delicacy; hearing which the youth promptly shot some and
sent them round to the ladies of the station. Do you believe that
tale? I don't.

... We have just finished dinner--much the most amusing dinner I ever
ate. There is an intense rivalry, it seems, between our cook and the
engineer-man's cook; and although we dined together, our bills-of-fare
were kept jealously apart. Autolycus, of course, waited on us, and
when he handed me the fish, and I helped myself to one of the four
pieces, he said sternly, "Two, please," and I meekly took the other.
The engineer had no fish, but on the other hand he had an entree which
was denied us. Both cooks rose to a savoury. (They _will_ give you
the savoury before the sweet. If you insist on anything else, it so
demoralizes them that the dinner is a ruin.) Our savoury was rather
ambitious--stuffed eggs rolled in vermicelli. It tasted rather like a
bird's-nest, and one felt it had taken a lot of making and rolling
in brown hands. I envied the simpler poached egg on tomato of the
engineer. You can't _pat_ a poached egg!

_Rika, Feb. 9_.

I have no home letters to answer this week. We forgot to give the
Calcutta people the new address, so on Monday night the dak-runner
with his bells would jingle with my precious home mail into the Takai
verandah; Mrs. Russel, having no other address, would re-direct them
back to Calcutta, and they may reach us here about Sunday, It is
tantalizing, but I don't pine for news in Rika so much as in most
places. I am so thoroughly at home. I find the Mofussil is simply full
of nice people. When we rode out here on Monday morning, and Mrs.
Royle, with a shy small girl on either side, came down the verandah
steps to meet us, I knew I was going to love staying here. There is an
atmosphere about that makes for peace and happiness, and every day I
like the place and the people more.

Rika was rather a revelation. The civilians' bungalows have a
here-we-have-no-continuing-city look about them; their owners are
constantly being moved, and pitching their moving tents elsewhere;
but the Royles have been at Rika for fifteen years, and have made a
delightful home. The bungalow is built on a slightly rising ground
with a verandah all round--a verandah made pleasant with comfortable
chairs, rugs, writing-tables, books, and flowers. At one end a
_dirzee_ squats with a sewing-machine, surrounded by white stuff in
various stages of progress for the Mem Sahib