bar the
excessive number of meals between events,[12] and tiresome in regard to
the inevitable number of changes of clothes. The ride we start after an
early cup of tea. It begins pleasantly cool, but in an hour you feel the
sun hot, and are glad to get in and change to dry clothes, and have
breakfast proper about 9 A.M. The Brother then goes to office, which is
a building like an extensive hydropathic, on an eminence to which on
various roads, at certain hours of the day, streams of tidy native
clerks may be seen going and coming. Of what they do when they get
there, or where they go when they leave I have no idea; the country all
round seems just red, rolling, gritty soil, with thorny bushes and
scattered trees! But there is a native town; possibly these men go
there, though their costumes are too trim to suggest native quarters.

There is such silence up here on the tableland at mid-day--only a light
soughing of the soft, hot wind, otherwise not even the cheep of a
lizard. A little later in the afternoon begins the note of a bird, like
a regular drop of water into a metal pot, very soft and liquid, and when
the gardener waters the flowers, more birds come round to drink. The
house too is absolutely still; the servants drowse in their quarters in
the compound; G. and her maid in a back room are quiet as mice; they got
a sewing machine, which was a very clever thing to do, but it was a
tartar, it wouldn't work--that was "Indian" I expect--so they have had a
most happy morning pulling it to bits, and putting it together again--I
wonder if they will make it go.

[12] Specially laid on for our benefit.

The most social part of the day here is the meeting at the club after
the business day is done. I have not heard Indian club life described,
but this club, though small, is, I think, fairly typical. Half the
station turns up at it every evening before dinner; I should think there
are generally about twenty ladies and men. You bike down, or drive, and
play tennis on hard clay courts, a very fast game; then play badminton
inside when it gets dark, and the lamps are lit.--I'd never played it
before. What a good game it is; but how difficult it is to see the
shuttle-cock in the half light as it crosses the lamp's rays--A.1.
practice for grouse driving, and a good middle-aged man's game; for
reach and quick eye and hand come in, and the player doesn't require to
be so nimble on his pins as at tennis. To-night the little stati