te borders
of the road itself reveal nothing but a dense mass of tropical verdure
and carefully cut hedges, but at intervals there is a wide gap in
the hedge, and a road leads off into the seeming jungle. At every
such entrance there are posts of masonry, and a plate bearing the
name of the manor and its owner.

At the end of a long aisle of palms and banians you see a bit of
wide-spreading veranda, and the full-open doors of a cool, black
interior. Acres of closely shaven lawns, dotted with flowering shrubs
of the brightest reds, deepest purples, and fieriest solferinos,
beds of rich-hued foliage plants, and cool, green masses of ferns
meet your eye.

Perhaps you spy the inevitable tennis-court, swarming with players,
and bordered with tables covered with tea and sweets. Red-turbaned
Malay kebuns, or gardeners, are chasing the balls, and scrupulously
clean Chinese "boys" are passing silently among the guests with trays
of eatables.

Dozens of gharries dodge past. Hundreds of rickshaws pull out of
the way.

A great landau, drawn by a pair of thoroughbred Australian horses,
driven by a Malay syce, and footman in full livery, and containing a
bare-headed Chinese merchant, in the simple flowing garments of his
nation, dashes along. The victoria and the dog-cart of the European,
and the universal palanquin of the Anglo-Indian, form a perfect maze
of wheels.

Suddenly the road is filled with a long line of bullock-carts. You
swing your little pony sharply to one side, barely escaping the big
wooden hub of the first cart. The syce springs down from behind,
and belabors the native bullock driver, who, paying no attention to
the blows rained upon his naked back, belabors his beasts in turn,
calling down upon their ungainly humps the curses of his religion. The
scene is so familiar that only a "globe-trotter" would notice it. Yet
to me there is nothing more truly artistic, or more typically Indian
in India, than a long line of these bullock-carts, laden with the
products of the tropics,--pineapples, bananas, gambier, coffee,--urged
on by a straight, graceful driver, winding slowly along a palm and
banian shaded road. We would meet such processions at every turning,
but never without recalling glorious childish pictures of the Holy
Land and Bible scenery as we painted them, while our father read of a
Sunday morning out of the old "Domestic Bible,"--we children pronounce
it "Dom-i-stick,"--how the Lord said unto Moses, "Go