, and soon were blended with the deluge and lost to
sight.

"When I went down into the public room, the Frenchman had his bottle
of wine and plate of food on a bare table black with grease, and was
"chomping" like a horse. He had the little religious paper which is
in everybody's hands on the Rhone borders, and was enlightening
himself with the histories of French saints who used to flee to the
desert in the Middle Ages to escape the contamination of woman. For
two hundred years France has been sending missionaries to other
savage lands. To spare to the needy from poverty like hers is fine
and true generosity."

But to get back to India--where, as my favorite poem says--

"Every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile."

It is because Bavaria and Austria and France have not introduced their
civilization to him yet. But Bavaria and Austria and France are on their
way. They are coming. They will rescue him; they will refine the
vileness out of him.

Some time during the forenoon, approaching the mountains, we changed from
the regular train to one composed of little canvas-sheltered cars that
skimmed along within a foot of the ground and seemed to be going fifty
miles an hour when they were really making about twenty. Each car had
seating capacity for half-a-dozen persons; and when the curtains were up
one was substantially out of doors, and could see everywhere, and get all
the breeze, and be luxuriously comfortable. It was not a pleasure
excursion in name only, but in fact.

After a while the stopped at a little wooden coop of a station just
within the curtain of the sombre jungle, a place with a deep and dense
forest of great trees and scrub and vines all about it. The royal Bengal
tiger is in great force there, and is very bold and unconventional. From
this lonely little station a message once went to the railway manager in
Calcutta: "Tiger eating station-master on front porch; telegraph
instructions."

It was there that I had my first tiger hunt. I killed thirteen. We were
presently away again, and the train began to climb the mountains. In one
place seven wild elephants crossed the track, but two of them got away
before I could overtake them. The railway journey up the mountain is
forty miles, and it takes eight hours to make it. It is so wild and
interesting and exciting and enchanting that it ought to take a week.