ll is
the changing sky, where the clear blue gives way to a billowy expanse of
white rolling clouds or dark rain-laden masses, which pour into the upper
clefts of the ravine, and blot out the serried ranks of the pines, until a
thorough drenching seems inevitable--when lo! a glint of blue through the
gloomy background, and soon again,

"With never a stain, the pavilion of Heaven is bare."

The immediate foreground, as I said before, slopes sharply from my very
feet, where a clump of wild sage and jasmin (the leaves just breaking)
grows over a charming little bunch of sweet violets. Lower down I can see
the lilac flowers of a self-heal, and the bottom of the little gorge is
clothed with a bush like a hazel, only with large, soft whitish flowers.

My solitude has just been enlivened by the appearance of a cheerful party
of lovely birds. They are very busy among the "hazels," flying from bush
to bush with restless activity, and wasting no time in idleness. They are
about the size of large finches--slender in shape, with longish tails.
They are divided into two perfectly distinct kinds, probably male and
female. The former have the back, head, and wings black; the latter barred
with scarlet, the breast and underparts also scarlet. The others--which I
assume to be the females--replace the black with ashy olive, the wings
being barred with yellow, the underparts yellowish. The very familiar note
of the cuckoo, somewhere up in the jungle, reminds me of an English spring.

4 P.M.--I knew it! I knew that if the wind held down the nullah I should
be dragged up that horrible ridge opposite. Hardly had I written the above
when I was hunted from my lair, and rushed down 200 steep feet, and then
up some 500 or 600 on the other side of the stream, through an abattis of
clinging undergrowth that made a severe toil of what could never have been
a pleasure. There can be no doubt but that a pith helmet--a really shady,
broad one--is a most infernal machine under which to force one's way
through brushwood.

Well, all things come to an end--wind first, temper next, and finally the
journey.

My shikari is a fiend in human shape. He slinks along on the flat at what
_looks_ like a mild three-miles-an-hour constitutional, but unless you are
a _real_ four-mile man you will be left hopelessly astern; but when he
gets upon his favourite "one in one" slope, then does he simply sail away,
with the tiffin coolie carrying a fat basket and all y