out where it is least expected,
and gives one rather the feeling of being a tinker sleeping in a barn.
At night a tent is an awesome place. It is terrible to have no door
to lock, and to be entirely at the mercy of anything that creeps and
crawls; to have only a mosquito-net between you and an awful end.
I woke last night to hear something sniffing outside the tent. It
scraped and scraped, and I was sure that it was digging a hole and
creeping underneath the canvas. I sat up in bed and in a quavering
voice said "Go away," and the noise stopped, but only to begin
again--scrape, scrape, snuffle, snuffle, in the most eerie way. Then
something worse happened. At my very ear, as it seemed, the most
blood-curdling yell rent the astonished air. It was only a jackal,
Boggley says, but it sounded as if all the forces of evil had been let
loose at once. You can laugh if you like, but I think it was enough to
frighten a very Daniel. As for me, in one moment I was well under the
blankets, with fingers in both ears, and I suppose even in the midst
of my terror I must have fallen asleep, for the next thing I knew was
daylight and the cheerful sound of voices. To-night I shall have a
lamp burning and a _chokidar_ (watchman) to sleep outside my tent.

Baratah is quite a large town, and has a Roman Catholic Mission and
two lady doctors. We are camping about a mile from the town in a
corner of Mr. Lister's compound. It is pretty, with well-kept grass
and flower-beds, and opposite is the Guest House of the Raj, where we
would be staying now were it not that its roof is not quite safe, and
it cannot be used. I went through it, and a great neglected place it
is, with tawdry Early Victorian furniture and awful oleographs.

When the sun had gone down yesterday, we went for a walk to explore,
along an avenue of peepul trees, across a fine polo-ground, and then
we lighted on a big tank. A tiny native boy was perched on the bank
watching something in the water, so we sat down beside him and watched
too. The something was very large and black, and we were puzzled to
know what it was, till, at a word from the child, it heaved itself out
of the water and revealed itself an elephant. Up it came to where we
were, laid its trunk down so that the small boy could walk up, and off
he went proudly riding on its head. It was the nicest thing to watch I
ever saw.

We got the home mail the night we arrived here, but couldn't see to
read it till the next