a room with chintz covered European furniture and photographs, a
pretty girl--just a little dark, played a concertina to an immaculately
dressed youth, who twirled the latest thing in straw hats.

Then to dinner at The Fort to dine with Major B. C.--a tiresome long
drive in the dark with a slow horse; at the end of it we crossed a
drawbridge over a moat--full of water we could see, from the faint
reflection of a white angle of a bastion on the dark surface--rumbled
through subterranean arches, white-washed and lamplit, and felt as we
came into the square that we had left modern India outside in the
darkness and had got back to the old India of the Company days. A pale
crescent moon lit up part of a building here and there, old formal
Georgian buildings and old-fashioned gun-embrasures and a church like
St. Martin in the Fields. One half expected to meet someone in knee
breeches and wig, perhaps a Governor, Elihu Yale, or M'Crae, the seaman,
Clive, or Hastings coming round some dusky corner or across the moonlit
square. There were a few soldiers here and there, taking their rest with
grey shirt-sleeves rolled up. We had to mark time a little, as we had
started half-an-hour too soon, so I went on to the parapet and looked
from the flagstaff east into the night, and heard the Bay of Bengal surf
pounding on the sands. I spoke for a little to two soldiers lounging
there on the parapet edge; they told me they were Suffolks and felt it
warm. What interesting talks one could have had with these men, as a
stranger, and with no impending dinner and no white waistcoat. I am not
surprised Kipling made some of his best tales about privates; they are
of the interesting mean in life, between the rulers and the ruled. These
private soldiers, or fishermen and sailors can tell you stories better
than any other class of men, but you must not show the least sign of
gold braid if you would draw them out. I remember one night, I went
round the dockyard bars at a northern seaport with a retired naval
officer to get first hand information about a trip we planned to Davis
Straits for musk oxen--with the artist's modest manner and the
suggestion of a drink thrown in, I'd have got any number of yarns from
them till "Eleven o'clock, Gentlemen, and the Police outside!" But my
friend in mufti was spotted at once; for he marched up to the middle of
the bar, looked right and left and snapped out his order; but before he
opened his mouth the whaling men