't be me if I could. My heart may be,
indeed, I think it is, full of the warmest instincts, but they have
been unwinged from birth so they can't fly to you. One of the most
talkative people living, in some ways I am strangely speechless. Why!
I haven't even told Boggley, though if he had eyes to see instead of
being the blindest of dear old bats, my shining face would betray
me. I keep on smiling in a perfectly imbecile manner, so that people
exclaim, "Well, you are indecently glad to get away," and when they
ask Why? I point them to the scene in the Old Testament where Hadad
said unto Pharaoh, "_Let me depart, that I may go to mine own
country." Then Pharaoh said unto him, "But what hast thou lacked with
me, that, behold, thou seekest to go to thine own country?" And he
answered, "Nothing: howbeit let me go in any wise_." So it is with
me. India has given me the best of good times. I have lacked for
nothing--"howbeit let me go in any wise." You needn't think I am
changed. I'm not. I'm afraid I'm not. One would think that a new
environment would make a difference, but it really does not. A person
with a suburban mind would be as suburban in the wilds of Nepal as in
the wilds of Tooting. The illuminating thought has come to me that it
isn't a man's environment that matters, it's his mind. Haven't you
often noticed in an evening in London all the City men hurrying home
like rabbits to their burrows (not the prosperous City men, but the
lesser ones, whose frock-coats are rather shiny and their silk hats
rather dull), and haven't you often thought how narrow their lives
are, how cramping their environment? But suppose one of those clerks
loves books and is something of a poet. What does it matter to him
though his rooms in Clapham or Brixton are grimy, almost squalid, and
filled with the worst kind of Victorian furniture? "Minds innocent and
quiet take such for an hermitage." Once inside, the long day at the
office over, and the door shut on the world, an arm-chair drawn up to
the fire and his books around him he is as happy as a king, for his
mind to him is a Kingdom. He may be a puny little man, in bodily
presence contemptible, but he will feel no physical disabilities as he
clambers on the wall of Jerusalem with Count Raymond, or thrills as he
sets forth with Drake to fight Spaniards one against ten. Instead of
the raucous cries of the milk or the coal man, he hears the horns of
Elfland faintly blowing, and instead of a w