e; they all got exceedingly
drunk, and the Admiral stopped their leave for two months, so we saw no
more of them. They were quite good boys really though, like all their
kind, rather over-full of high spirits.

As is well known, Queen Victoria celebrated her seventieth birthday by
commencing the study of Hindustani under the tuition of a skilled
Moonshee. At the farewell audience the Queen gave my sister, Her
Majesty, on learning that Lady Lansdowne intended to begin learning
Hindustani as soon as she reached India, proposed that they should
correspond occasionally in Urdu, to test the relative progress they
were making. Every six months or so a letter from the Queen,
beautifully written in Persian characters, reached Calcutta, to which
my sister duly replied. In strict confidence, I may say that I strongly
suspect that Lady Lansdowne's letters were written by her Moonshee, and
that she merely copied the Persian characters, which she could do very
neatly. The Arabic alphabet is used in writing Persian, with three or
four extra letters added to express sounds which do not exist in
Arabic; it is, of course, written from right to left. I had an hour and
a half's daily lesson in Urdu from an efficient, if immensely pompous,
Moonshee, but I never attempted to learn to read or write the Persian
characters.

I do not think that any one who has not traversed the plains of
Northern Indian can have any idea of their deadly monotony. Hour after
hour of level, sun-baked wheat-fields, interspersed with arid tracts of
desert, hardly conforms to the traditional idea of Indian scenery, nor
when once Bengal is left behind is there any of that luxuriant
vegetation which one instinctively associates with hot countries. In
bars in the United States, any one wishing for whisky and water was (I
advisedly use the past tense) accustomed to drain a small tumbler of
neat whisky, and then to swallow a glass of water. In India everything
is arranged on this principle; the whisky and the water are kept quite
separate. The dead-flat expanse of the Northern plains is unbroken by
the most insignificant of mounds; on the other hand, in the hills it is
almost impossible to find ten yards of level ground. In the same way
during the dry season you know with absolute certainty that there will
be no rain; whilst during the rains you can predict, without the
faintest shadow of doubt, that the downpour will continue day by day.
Personally, I prefer whisky a