anchored in the afternoon two of the officers went on shore to
shoot, and the sailors let down a net and caught delicious fish for
dinner. I did wish Peter had been there. He would have felt like
Robinson Crusoe and rejoiced in it all. At dinner the young men told
us wonderful stories of their adventures with snakes and tigers. One
man said that he was having his bath one morning when a snake came
up the pipe. When it saw him it went down again, but as it was
disappearing he pulled it back by its tail. Again it tried to go down
and again he pulled it back, and then the snake took a look at him and
went down tail first.

I believed every word, but when I came home and related the amazing
tales to Boggley he received them with derisive shouts of laughter,
and said they had been spinning us sailors' yarns.

The mail was waiting here when I came back yesterday. Thanks so much
for your letter. I am immensely interested in all your news, but I
have left myself no time to answer you properly, as this must be
posted to-day.

_N.B_.--The two queerest things I have noticed in Calcutta up to now
are:

(_a_) That when a man goes out to tennis and stays to dinner his
bearer carries his dress-clothes _wrapped in a towel_.

(_b_) Kippered herrings come to the table _rolled up in paper_.

_Calcutta, Dec. 2_.

I don't think I like this casting of bread upon the water; I never
know which loaf it is I am receiving again. You reply to things I had
forgotten I had written, and it is rather bewildering.

When you get this you will be settled down in Germany. I am sorry you
have left London for one reason, and that a purely selfish one. I
shan't be able to imagine you in your new surroundings, and in London
I knew pretty well what you would be doing every minute of the day.
Knowing, as we do, many of the same people, when you wrote "I have
been dining with the Maxwell-Tempests to meet the So-and-sos," I could
picture it all even to little Mrs. Maxwell-Tempest's attitudes. I
was only in Germany once for three days, and I came away with an
impression of a country weird as to food, feathery as to beds, and
crammed full of soldiers; but I dare say it is a very good place to
write a book. And now--my heartiest congratulations on having a book
to write. It sounds--pardon me for saying it--a very dull subject, but
if I were a little wiser I expect I should see how important it
is, and anyway I have enough sense to perceive that it is a g