allow myself, however, to say
that if, before venturing on it, you lay in a stock of boiled tongues,
sardines, marmalade, and tea and sugar, you could not do better by way
of forestalling starvation and repentance. Every day I stopped once or
twice at a travelers' bungalow, or rest-house; and I managed,
notwithstanding that my stock of Urdu was scanty, to make my wants
understood. That a great part of the copious monologue which my
purveyors expended, as we settled the details of breakfast or dinner,
was lost on me, did not seem, in the final result, to matter in the
least. What I needed I asked for, and then listened attentively for
the barbaric representative of "yes" or "no" in the Babel of sounds
that followed, neglecting the flux of verbiage that engulfed it with
the same lofty indifference which a mathematician professes toward
infinitely small quantities. With a view to avoiding cross-purposes
there is nothing like economy of speech. But how my tawny hosts could
contrive to realize such a fortune of talk out of their very meagre
capital of subject-matter excited my never-ending wonder. They could
provide forlorn pullets, certainly from the same farmyard with the
lean kine of Egypt, and to these they could add, what was much better
left unadded, a villainous species of unleavened bread, a sort of
hoecake, not at all improved--precisely like the run of travelers--by
leaving home and wandering in the Orient. And this was about all they
could provide. But, I repeat, how could expatiate on them! And how
bespattered one with compound epithets of adulation!

A friend of mine, a lady, when fresh in the country once compromised
herself rather astonishingly by lending an ear to their multiloquence,
instead of resolutely refusing her attention to all communication but
that consisting of "yea, yea," and "nay, nay." She had noted down, in
her tablets, the Urdu wherewith to ask whether a thing is procurable,
and to order it, if procurable, to be forthcoming, with the
appropriate outlandish words for "pullet" and "hoecake," and also
those for straightforward answers, affirmative and negative. She was
certain that with this lingual accoutrement she could not possibly be
taken at a disadvantage. The experience of a few hours, however,
unsettled her self-confidence very considerably. She alights at a
wayside hostelry. Khudabakhsh, the chief servant in attendance,
arrayed in more or less fine linen, without the purple, surmounted