ll kind of
day, when no one had thought of anything particularly amusing to do. So
that, as it happened to be dinner-time and we had just washed our hands
and faces, we were all spotlessly clean (compared with what we are
sometimes, I mean, of course).

We were just sitting down to dinner, and Albert's uncle was just
plunging the knife into the hot heart of the steak pudding, when there
was the rumble of wheels, and the station fly stopped at the garden
gate. And in the fly, sitting very upright, with his hands on his knees,
was our Indian relative so much beloved. He looked very smart, with a
rose in his buttonhole. How different from what he looked in other days
when he helped us to pretend that our currant pudding was a wild boar we
were killing with our forks. Yet, though tidier, his heart still beat
kind and true. You should not judge people harshly because their clothes
are tidy. He had dinner with us, and then we showed him round the place,
and told him everything we thought he would like to hear, and about the
Tower of Mystery, and he said:

"It makes my blood boil to think of it."

Noel said he was sorry for that, because everyone else we had told it to
had owned, when we asked them, that it froze their blood.

"Ah," said the Uncle, "but in India we learn how to freeze our blood and
boil it at the same time."

In those hot longitudes, perhaps, the blood is always near boiling
point, which accounts for Indian tempers, though not for the curry and
pepper they eat. But I must not wander; there is no curry at all in this
story. About temper I will not say.

The Uncle let us all go with him to the station when the fly came back
for him; and when we said good-bye he tipped us all half a quid, without
any insidious distinctions about age or considering whether you were a
boy or a girl. Our Indian uncle is a true-born Briton, with no nonsense
about him.

We cheered him like one man as the train went off, and then we offered
the fly-driver a shilling to take us back to the four cross-roads, and
the grateful creature did it for nothing because, he said, the gent had
tipped him something like. How scarce is true gratitude! So we cheered
the driver too for this rare virtue, and then went home to talk about
what we should do with our money.

I cannot tell you all that we did with it, because money melts away
"like snow-wreaths in thaw-jean," as Denny says, and somehow the more
you have the more quickly it melts. W