lost his head on my arrival. He had served a Sahib once. Did I
know that Sahib? He gave me the name of a well-known man who has been
buried for more than a quarter of a century, and showed me an ancient
daguerreotype of that man in his prehistoric youth. I had seen a steel
engraving of him at the head of a double volume of Memoirs a month before,
and I felt ancient beyond telling.

The day shut in and the _khansamah_ went to get me food. He did not go
through the, pretense of calling it "_khana_"--man's victuals. He said
"_ratub_," and that means, among other things, "grub"--dog's rations.
There was no insult in his choice of the term. He had forgotten the other
word, I suppose.

While he was cutting up the dead bodies of animals, I settled myself down,
after exploring the dak-bungalow. There were three rooms, beside my own,
which was a corner kennel, each giving into the other through dingy white
doors fastened with long iron bars. The bungalow was a very solid one, but
the partition walls of the rooms were almost jerry-built in their
flimsiness. Every step or bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the
other three, and every footfall came back tremulously from the far walls.
For this reason I shut the door. There were no lamps--only candles in long
glass shades. An oil wick was set in the bathroom.

For bleak, unadulterated misery that dak-bungalow was the worst of the
many that I had ever set foot in. There was no fireplace, and the windows
would not open; so a brazier of charcoal would have been useless. The rain
and the wind splashed and gurgled and moaned round the house, and the
toddy palms rattled and roared. Half a dozen jackals went through the
compound singing, and a hyena stood afar off and mocked them. A hyena
would convince a Sadducee of the Resurrection of the Dead--the worst sort
of Dead. Then came the _ratub_--a curious meal, half native and half
English in composition--with the old _khansamah_ babbling behind my chair
about dead and gone English people, and the wind-blown candles playing
shadow-bo-peep with the bed and the mosquito-curtains. It was just the
sort of dinner and evening to make a man think of every single one of his
past sins, and of all the others that he intended to commit if he lived.

Sleep, for several hundred reasons, was not easy. The lamp in the bathroom
threw the most absurd shadows into the room, and the wind was beginning to
talk nonsense.

Just when the reasons were drows