d be a shop all open to the road, where,
cross-legged upon a kind of dais, the merchant sat among his piled
wares, unenterprising and unsolicitous, serenely confident in the
balance-sheet of fate. On the left, in a shady corner, a barber would be
bending over a half-shaven skull. Everywhere children of every shade
from yellow to deep umber would be playing solemnly about the ways,
turning upon the passing stranger their grave, unfathomable eyes.

Beyond the village there would be a rest-house maintained for the use of
wayfaring white men, and here we would repose through the heat of the
day, reclining with a book in rooms shaded with shutters, or with fine
mats drenched from hour to hour with cooling sprays of water. Then with
the sun's decline we would set out once more, meeting a file of
blue-robed women erect as caryatides as they came up from the well,
each bearing upon her back-thrown head a water-jar of earthen or brazen
ware, staying her burden with a shapely brown arm circled with bangles
of glass and silver. In the short hours before the darkness, we would
encounter all the types of men which go to make up Indian country
life--the red-slippered banker jogging on his pony beneath a white
umbrella, the vendor of palm-wine urging a donkey almost lost beneath
the swollen skins, barefooted ryots with silent feet and strident
tongues, crowds of boys and children driving buffaloes and cows, all
coming homeward from their labour with the evening.

And when these had gone by, and we rolled on through the scented air of
the silent open country, we would come perhaps in the gathering darkness
to a great river lapping and murmuring through the blackened rocks above
the ford, and shining like a glorious path in the light of the rising
moon. Silently, high above the banks, there would flit through the still
air bands of flying foxes awakened for their nightly raid upon the
plantain groves; and in the shadows of the further bank there would
gleam a sudden light, or the echoes of a hailing voice would rise and
then die away. Steeped in the poetry of all these things we would cross
and emerge upon the opposite slope to begin the pilgrimage of the night
anew. So to live tranquil days and unfretful, moving in quiet through a
still land rich in old tradition--this was an experience of peace which
no dreams of imagination could surpass, a freshness of joy penetrative
as the fragrance of unplucked wayside flowers.

Sometimes we wo