dirt,
The sunshine painted with a squirt."

Then the man who patted the painter on the back turned upon me
aggressively, and said: "This is the only painter who ever was, or will be,
and if you don't agree with me you are a fool." The painter, smiling a sly
Monna-Lisan smile of triumph, remarked: "Right you are, John. I rather
think this _will_ knock that rascal Claude," and I laughed so that I awoke;
but the memory of the dream remained with me, and it seemed to me that,
perhaps, we poor amateurs might not be any better able to compass aught
but caricatures of this marvellous scenery than the ghostly limners of my
dream!

The hut just above ours was tenanted by a party of three young Lancers on
leave from Rawal Pindi, a gramophone, and a few dogs.

One of the soldiers was laid up with a bad ankle, and it soon became a
daily custom for Jane or me to play a game of chess or piquet with the
invalid.

Later on, when leave had expired for the hale, when the dogs had departed,
and the voice of the gramophone was no more heard in the land, we came to
see a great deal of the wounded warrior, and finally arranged to
personally conduct him off the premises, and return him, in time for
medical survey, to Rawal Pindi.

Many years ago I read a delightful poem called _The Paradise of Birds_--I
believe it was by Mortimer Collins,[1] but I am not sure. Now the Poet
(who, together with Windbag, sailed to this very paradise of birds) deemed
that this happy asylum of the feathered fowls was somewhere at the back of
the North Pole. He cannot have known of Kashmir, or he would assuredly
have sent the persecuted birds thither, and placed the "Roc's Egg" as
janitor, somewhere by the portals of the Jhelum Valley. Kashmir is truly
and indeed the paradise of birds, for there no man molests them, and no
schoolboy collects eggs, and the result is a fascinating fearlessness, the
result of perpetual peace and plenty.

I regret exceedingly that my ornithological knowledge is extremely limited.
I could find no books to help me,[2] and, as I did not care to kill any
birds merely to enable me to identify their species, my notes were merely
"popular" and not "scientific."

Shall I confess that I began an erudite work on the birds of Kashmir, but
got no further than the Hoopoe? It began as follows:--

THE HOOPOE

_Early history of_.--Tereus, King of Thrace, annoyed his wife Procne so
much by the very marked attention which he paid to her si