lar, a soda-water range, a wardrobe, a kitchen; in fact,
there is no limit to the elasticity of a palkee. My plan was,
surreptitiously, to add a new comfort every day, and the unsuspecting
coolies carried me along as briskly as if my palkee contained nothing but
myself, and never seemed to feel the additional weight, upon the
principle of the man who could lift an ox by dint of doing so every
morning from the time when it was a calf.

Then the delightful feeling of security, and the certainty that your
bearers won't shy, or come into collision, or go off the rails, or
otherwise injure your nerves or bones. You are independent of hotels and
hospitality. If the traveller in India depended upon the former, he
would pass many a night with the kerbstone for his pillow, if he had not
courage to claim the latter--which, be it remembered, he is certain to
receive abundantly at the hands of the Burra Sahib. A modest man has his
palkee; and for lack of courage on the one hand, and a rest-house on the
other, he orders himself to be set down for the night by the wayside,
and, shutting the doors towards the road, after boiling the water and
making tea with the apparatus contained in his pantry, he lights his
lamp, reads for an hour, pulls a light shawl over him, turns round, and
goes to sleep as soundly as if he were sumptuously couched in Belgravia.

If the palkee be a good one, it defies weather; but I admit it is not
pleasant, on a dark night, to be carried along a slippery road with a
careless set of bearers.

During the whole period of our journey since we had left Agra, with one
or two breaks in its ordinary routine, we seemed to have been passing a
monotonous existence at the same small and uncomfortable bungalow. It
consists of two rooms; in front is a tope of trees; behind are a few low
sandstone or trap hills, some scrubby bushes climbing up the sides, out
of which a partridge may easily be flushed: for the rest, the view
extends over a boundless plain, assuming during the heat of the day a
light yellow colour, at which period the coolies are all asleep in the
verandah, snoring in an infinite and interesting variety of notes and
keys.

At sunset we take a constitutional, followed by our portable residences,
into which, after a romantic tea-drinking by the roadside, we turn in for
the night, awaking at daylight to find ourselves thirty miles nearer to
our journey's end, in a bungalow precisely similar to the one we