s, and the sides of the Apollo
Bundar (the landing place of the Prince) are a mass of decorations and
flags. Below our windows in the shadow of our hotel on the embankment,
the crowd of natives in their best behaviour and best clothes move to
and fro making holiday, watching the ships and any ceremony that may
come off in their neighbourhood, for like our own natives they love a
tamasha. They wear flimsy clothes of varied colours, lemon-yellow and
pale rose, white and pale green, and the Southern light softens all
these by making each reflect a little on to the other.

... There they go again! banging away--good thing there's no glass in
our hotel windows! You can hardly see the shipping now, the smoke hangs
low on the turquoise blue of the bay, and you can just see the yellow
gleam of the flash and feel the concussion and the roar that follows.

Interjectory this journal must be, even my sketches are running into
meaningless strokes with so many subjects following one on the top of
the other. In the pauses that follow the passing of troops and
gun-firing, the crowds in the streets below our hotel watch snake
charmers, jugglers, and monkey trainers who play up to us at our
balconies.

What a delight!--there they are, all the figures we knew as dusty
coloured models as children, now all alive and moving and real. The
snake charmer, a north countryman, I think, sits on his heels on the
road and grins up at us and chatters softly and continuously, holding up
his hands full of emerald green slow moving snakes; a crowd of holiday
townspeople stand round him at a little distance and watch closely. He
stows the green snakes away into a basket, and his hands are as lithe as
his snakes but quicker, then pipes to nasty cobras, the colour of the
dusty road; they raise their heads and blow out their hoods and sway to
and fro as he plays. Then the mongoose man shows how his beast eats a
snake's head--no trick about this! And always between the turns of the
performances the performers look up and show their white teeth and talk
softly to us, but we can't hear what they say the windows are so high
up. Then bang go the guns again, and we shut our blinds and try to read
of the show of the day, the opening of Princes Street, when the Prince
drove through "millions of happy and prettily dressed subjects." As we
read there comes a knock and a message with an invitation card to see
the Prince open a museum, and we read on; another knock c