umbers, Mina birds, the Seven Sisters,
King Crows, and one of his (E.H.A.'s) enemies comes in as I write, a
yellow-eyed frog; he hops in on the matting and looks and looks--I like
the unfathomable philosophy in its golden eye. And my brother stops
reading Indian politics and calls me outside to see a Horn Bill--all
beak, and little head or body to speak of, he sways on a leafless tree
and scraiks anxiously for his friends; they are generally in companies
of three or four. A little later, as I write beside a reading lamp in
G.'s room, a lizard takes a position on the window, and out of the outer
darkness comes a moth and lights on to the outside of the pane, and the
lizard pecks at it--neither the moth nor the lizard understand
glass--peck, peck, every now and then--trying to get through to the
moth--how delightfully human--the perpetual endeavour to get Beyond,
without the will or power to see the infinite reflections of the Inside.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As we speculate to-night as to where some of our neighbours on the
"Egypt" may have got to by this time, the post comes in with letters
from this one and the other. One is from Mrs Deputy-Commissioner. A few
days ago we were altogether in Bombay, melting in the heat, and now we
are towards the south of this Peninsula, and she writes from its
farthest north: we are in a hot parched country, whilst she and the
D.-C. are in camp, sitting over a huge fire of logs in a pine forest.
She writes, "To-morrow we enter a valley where five bears have recently
been seen and pheasants abound," and the day after "we shall be at the
top of the pass, 9,000 feet. Rosy snows and golden mists far below us
melt into purple depths."... So this day's journal closes with pleasant
thoughts of relatives and pleasant friends in many distant parts of this
wide land.

... Sunday.--We arrived here on Friday--the silence is almost
oppressive. Great grey clouds roll up from the east all day till
evening, when they form solid bluish ranks; each cloud threatens rain
which never falls. The stillness in the bungalow is only broken by the
occasional cheep, cheep, cheep of the house lizard, a tiny little fellow
that lives behind picture frames and in unused jugs and corners. His
body is only about an inch and a half long, but his clear voice fills
the large rooms and emphasies the silence. Outside it is as quiet; there
is the chink--chink of the copper-smit