ing home some
gold-fish for his aquarium. A few days before his death he had found his
way down to the Morningside cemetery, where he had been enjoying the
sunshine and flowers of Spring, and he remarked to his wife that he
would often go there in future to watch the birds building their nests.

Before that time came, he was himself laid to rest in that very spot in
sure and certain hope of a blessed resurrection.

The above imperfect sketch fails to give the charm and magnetic
attraction of the man, and for this one must go to his works, which for
those who knew him are very illuminating in this respect. In them one
catches a glimpse of his plan for keeping young and cheerful in "the
land of regrets," for one of his charms was his youthfulness and
interest in life. He refused to be depressed by his lonely life. "I am
only an exile," he remarks, "endeavouring to work a successful existence
in Dustypore, and not to let my environment shape me as a pudding takes
the shape of its mould, but to make it tributary to my own happiness."
He therefore urges his readers to cultivate a hobby.

"It is strange," he says, "that Europeans in India know so little, see
so little, care so little, about all the intense life that surrounds
them. The boy who was the most ardent of bug-hunters, or the most
enthusiastic of bird-nesters in England, where one shilling will buy
nearly all that is known, or can be known, about birds or butterflies,
maintains in this country, aided by Messrs. B. &. S., an unequal strife
with the insupportableness of an _ennui_-smitten life. Why, if he would
stir up for one day the embers of the old flame, he could not quench it
again with such a prairie of fuel around him. I am not speaking of
Bombay people, with their clubs and gymkhanas and other devices for
oiling the wheels of existence, but of the dreary up-country exile,
whose life is a blank, a moral Sahara, a catechism of the Nihilist
creed. What such a one needs is a hobby. Every hobby is good--a sign of
good and an influence for good. Any hobby will draw out the mind, but
the one I plead for touches the soul too, keeps the milk of human
kindness from souring, puts a gentle poetry into the prosiest life. That
all my own finer feelings have not long since withered in this land of
separation from 'old familiar faces,' I attribute partly to a pair of
rabbits. All rabbits are idiotic things, but these come in and sit up
meekly and beg a crust of bread, and