wo broad streaks of laughter in his wake, is turned
loose upon the reading public! Upon my word, I believe the reading
public would do better to go and sit at the feet of Baboo Sillabub
Thunder Gosht, B.A.

What is it that these travelling people put on paper? Let me put it in
the form of a conundrum. _Q._ What is it that the travelling M.P.
treasures up and the Anglo-Indian hastens to throw away? _A._
Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions. Before the eyes of the
griffin, India steams up in poetical mists, illusive, fantastic,
subjective, ideal, picturesque. The adult _Qui Hai_ attains to prose,
to stern and disappointing realities; he removes the gilt from the
Empire and penetrates to the brown ginger-bread of Rajas and Baboos.
One of the most serious duties attending a residence in India is the
correcting of those misapprehensions which your travelling M.P.
sacrifices his bath to hustle upon paper. The spectacled people
embalmed in secretariats alone among Anglo-Indians continue to see the
gay visions of griffinhood. They alone preserve the phantasmagoria of
bookland and dreamland. As for the rest of us:--

Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight:
Baboos and Rajas and Indian lore
Move our faint hearts with grief, but with delight
No more--oh, never more!

It is strange that one who is modest and inoffensive in his own
country should immediately on leaving it exhibit some of the worst
features of Arryism; but it seems inevitable. I have met in this
unhappy land, countrymen (who are gentlemen in England, Members of
Parliament, and Deputy Lieutenants, and that kind of thing) whose
conduct and demeanour while here I can never recall without tears and
blushes for our common humanity. My friends witnessing this emotion
often suppose that I am thinking of the Famine Commission.

[I am an Anglo-Indian cherishing many a burning Anglo-Indian
prejudice, and I should be sorry if from what I have written here it
does not sufficiently appear that I cherish a burning prejudice
against the British Tourist in India, who comes out to get up India
and to do India; not against the tourist who comes out to shoot or to
play the fool in a quiet unostentatious way.]

As far as I can learn, it is a generally received opinion at home that
a man who has seen the Taj at Agra, the Qutb at Delhi, and the Duke at
Madras, has graduated with honours in all questions connected with
British interests