stponed, I
prayed, for my sake, that my personal enjoyments may not be interfered
with. War, famine, and pestilence would be so inconvenient to me. And I
abased myself before Necessity, the great Goddess, and said
ostentatiously: "It is naught, it is naught, and you needn't look at me
when I wander about." Surely we are only virtuous by compulsion of
earning our daily bread.

So I looked upon men with new eyes, and pitied them very much indeed.
They worked. They had to. I was an aristocrat. I could call upon them at
inconvenient hours and ask them why they worked, and whether they did it
often. Then they grunted, and the envy in their eyes was a delight to
me. I dared not, however, mock them too pointedly, lest Necessity should
drag me back by the collar to take my still warm place by their side.
When I had disgusted all who knew me, I fled to Calcutta, which, I was
pained to see, still persisted in being a city and transacting commerce
after I had formally cursed it one year ago. That curse I now repeat, in
the hope that the unsavoury capital will collapse. One must begin to
smoke at five in the morning--which is neither night nor day--on coming
across the Howrah Bridge, for it is better to get a headache from honest
nicotine than to be poisoned by evil smells. And a man, who otherwise
was a nice man, though he worked with his hands and his head, asked me
why the scandal of the Simla Exodus was allowed to continue. To him I
made answer: "It is because this sewer is unfit for human habitation. It
is because you are all one gigantic mistake,--you and your monuments and
your merchants and everything about you. I rejoice to think that scores
of lakhs of rupees have been spent on public offices at a place called
Simla, that scores and scores will be spent on the Delhi-Kalka line, in
order that civilised people may go there in comfort. When that line is
opened, your big city will be dead and buried and done with, and I hope
it will teach you a lesson. Your city will rot, Sir." And he said: "When
people are buried here, they turn into adipocere in five days if the
weather is rainy. They saponify, you know." I said: "Go and saponify,
for I hate Calcutta." But he took me to the Eden Gardens instead, and
begged me for my own sake not to go round the world in this prejudiced
spirit. I was unhappy and ill, but he vowed that my spleen was due to my
"Simla way of looking at things."

All this world of ours knows something about the