nted feet, against the sands of the
Pacific, whose breakers were spouting and blowing not a quarter of a
mile away from the causeway. The Japs know all about forestry. They
stake down wandering sand-torrents, which are still allowed to ruin our
crops in the Hoshiarpur district, and they plug a shifting sand-dune
with wattle dams and pine seedlings as cleverly as they would pin plank
to plank. Were their forest officers trained at Nancy, or are they local
products? The stake-binding used to hold the sand is of French pattern,
and the diagonal planting out of the trees is also French.

Half a minute after the train dropped this desolate, hardly controlled
beach it raced through four or five miles of the suburbs of Patna, but
a clean and glorified Patna bowered in bamboo plantations. Then it hit a
tunnel and sailed forth into a section of the London, Brighton, and
South Coast, or whatever the line is that wants to make the Channel
tunnel. At any rate, the embankment was on the beach, and the waves
lapped the foot of it, and there was a wall of cut rock to landward.
Then we disturbed many villages of fishermen, whose verandahs gave on to
the track, and whose nets lay almost under our wheels. The railway was
still a new thing in that particular part of the world, for mothers held
up their babes to see it.

Any one can keep pace with Indian scenery, arranged as it is in reaches
of five hundred miles. This blinding alternation of field, mountain,
sea-beach, forest, bamboo grove, and rolling moor covered with azalea
blossoms was too much for me, so I sought the society of a man who had
lived in Japan for twenty years.

"Yes, Japan's an excellent country as regards climate. The rains begin
in May or latter April. June, July, and August are hot months. I've
known the thermometer as high as 86 deg. at night, but I'd defy the world to
produce anything more perfect than the weather between September and
May. When one gets seedy, one goes to the hot springs in the Hakone
mountains close to Yokohama. There are heaps of places to recruit in,
but we English are a healthy lot. Of course we don't have half as much
fun as you do in India. We are a small community, and all our amusements
are organised by ourselves for our own benefit--concerts, races, and
amateur theatricals and the like. You have heaps of 'em in India,
haven't you?"

"Oh, yes!" I said, "we enjoy ourselves awfully, 'specially about this
time of the year. I quite underst