. In the interests of our little world I would endure these
things and more. I would deliver "brawling judgments all day long; on
all things unashamed." I would go toward the rising sun till I reached
the heart of the world and once more smelt London asphalt.

The Indian public never gave me a brief. I took it, appointing myself
Commissioner in General for Our Own Sweet Selves. Then all the aspects
of life changed, as, they say, the appearance of his room grows strange
to a dying man when he sees it upon the last morning, and knows that it
will confront him no more. I had wilfully stepped aside from the current
of our existence, and had no part in any of Our interests. Up-country
the peach was beginning to bud, and men said that by cause of the heavy
snows in the Hills the hot weather would be a short one. That was
nothing to me. The punkahs and their pullers sat together in the
verandah, and the public buildings spawned thermantidotes. The
copper-smith sang in the garden and the early wasp hummed low down by
the door-handle, and they prophesied of the hot weather to come. These
things were no concern of mine. I was dead, and looked upon the old life
as a dead man--without interest and without concern.

It was a strange life; I had lived it for seven years or one day, I
could not be certain which. All that I knew was that I could watch men
going to their offices, while I slept luxuriously; could go out at any
hour of the day and sit up to any hour of the night, secure that each
morning would bring no toil. I understood with what emotions the freed
convict regards the prison he has quitted--insight which had hitherto
been denied me; and I further saw how intense is the selfishness of the
irresponsible man. Some said that the coming year would be one of
scarcity and distress because unseasonable rains were falling. I was
grieved. I feared that the Rains might break the railway line to the
sea, and so delay my departure. Again, the season would be a sickly one.
I fancied that Necessity might repent of her gift and for mere jest wipe
me off the face of the earth ere I had seen anything of what lay upon
it. There was trouble on the Afghan frontier; perhaps an army-corps
would be mobilised, and perhaps many men would die, leaving folk to
mourn for them at the hill-stations. My dread was that a Russian
man-of-war might intercept the steamer which carried my precious self
between Yokohama and San Francisco. Let Armageddon be po