, he would be quite delighted. I once asked Smith to keep a secret
of mine, and the poor old fellow was so much afraid of losing it that
in a few hours he had got everybody in the station helping him to keep
it. It always surprises me that men with so much time on their hands
do not become Political Agents.

Sometimes our old Colonel gets into the flagitious habit of writing
for the newspapers. He talks himself into thinking that he possesses a
grievance, so he puts together a fasciculus of lop-sided sentences,
gets the ideas set straight by the Doctor, the spelling refurbished
by the Padre, and fires off the product to the _Delhi Gazette_
or the _Himalayan Chronicle_. Then days of feverish excitement
supervene, hope alternating with fear. Will it appear? Will the
Commander-in-Chief be offended? Will the Government of India be angry?
What will the Service say?

The old Colonel is always rather suspicious of the great cocked-hats
at head-quarters. He knows that to maintain an air of activity they
must still be changing something or abolishing something, and he is
always afraid that they will change or abolish him. But how could they
change the old Colonel? In a regiment he would be like Alice in
Wonderland; on the Staff he would be like old wine in a new bottle.
They might make him a K.C.B., it is true; but he does not belong to
the Simla Band of Hope, and stars must not be allowed to shoot madly
from their sphere. As to abolishing the old Colonel, this too presents
its difficulties, for Sir Norman Henry and all the celebrated
cocked-hats at home and abroad look upon the Indian Staff Corps as
Pygmalion looked on his Venus. They dote on its lifeless charms, and
(figuratively) love to clasp it in their foolish arms. [Now the old
Colonel is the trunk of this Frankenstein--to change the scene. So we
must not abolish the old Colonel.]

It is better to dress him up in an old red coat, and strap him on to
an old sword with a brass scabbard, that he may stand up on high
ceremonials and drink the health of the good Queen for whom he has
lived bravely through sunshine and stormy weather, in defiance of
epidemics, retiring schemes and the Army Medical Department. It is
good to ask him to place his old knees under your hospitable board,
and to fill him with wholesome wine, while he decants the mellow
stories of an Anglo-India that is speedily dissolving from view.

The old Colonel has no harm in him; his scandal blows upon the