s round the Court and
Treasury. As for Boards of Revenue and Lieutenant-Governors who
occasionally come sweeping across the country, with their locust hosts
of servants and petty officials, they are but an occasional nightmare;
while the Governor-General is a mere shadow in the background of
thought, half blended with "John Company Bahadur" and other myths of
the dawn.

The Collector lives in a long rambling bungalow furnished with folding
chairs and tables, and in every way marked by the provisional
arrangements of camp life. He seems to have just arrived from out of
the firmament of green fields and mango groves that encircles the
little station where he lives; or he seems just about to pass away
into it again. The shooting-howdahs are lying in the verandah, the
elephant of a neighbouring landowner is swinging his hind foot to and
fro under a tree, or switching up straw and leaves on to his back, a
dozen camels are lying down in a circle making bubbling noises, and
tents are pitched here and there to dry, like so many white wings on
which the whole establishment is about to rise and fly away--fly away
into "the district," which is the correct expression for the vast
expanse of level plain melting into blue sky on the wide
horizon-circle around.

The Collector is a bustling man. He is always in a hurry. His
multitudinous duties succeed one another so fast that one is never
ended before the next begins. A mysterious thing called "the Joint"
comes gleaning after him, I believe, and completes the inchoate work.

The verandah is full of fat black men in clean linen waiting for
interviews. They are bankers, shopkeepers, and landholders, who have
only come to "pay their respects," with ever so little a petition as a
corollary. The chuprassie-vultures hover about them. Each of these
obscene fowls has received a gratification from each of the clean fat
men; else the clean fat men would not be in the verandah. This import
tax is a wholesome restraint upon the excessive visiting tendencies of
wealthy men of colour. [Several little groups of] brass dishes filled
with pistachio nuts and candied sugar are ostentatiously displayed
here and there; they are the oblations of the would-be visitors. The
English call these offerings "dollies"; the natives _dali_. They
represent in the profuse East the visiting cards of the meagre West.

Although from our lofty point of observation, among the pine-trees,
the Collector seems to be of t