ould smell sweeter under some other
name. This was a mistake.

Almost everything you are told in Simla is a mistake. You should never
believe anything you hear till it is contradicted by the _Pioneer_. I
suppose the Government of India is the greatest _gobemouche_ in the
world. I suppose there never was an administration of equal importance
which received so much information and which was so ill-informed. At a
bureaucratic Simla dinner-party the abysses of ignorance that yawn
below the company on every Indian topic are quite appalling!

I once heard Mr. Stokes say that he had never heard of my book on the
Permanent Settlement; and yet Mr. Stokes is a decidedly intelligent
man, with some knowledge of Cymric and law. I daresay now if you were
to draw off and decant the law on his brain, it would amount to a full
dose for an adult; yet he never heard of my book on the Permanent
Settlement. He knew about Blackstone; he had seen an old copy once in
a second-hand book shop; but he had never heard of my work! How
loosely the world floats around us! I question its objective reality.
I doubt whether anything has more objectivity in it than Ali Baba
himself. He was certainly flogged at school. Yet when we now try to
put our finger on Ali Baba he eludes the touch; when we try to lay him
he starts up gibbering at Cabul, Lahore, or elsewhere. Perhaps it is
easier to imprison him in morocco boards and allow him to be blown
with restless violence round about the pendant world, abandoned to
critics: whom our lawless and uncertain thoughts imagine howling.

[Ali Baba! I know not what thou art, but know that thou and I must
part; and why or where and how we met, I own to me's a secret yet. Ali
Baba, we've been long together through pleasant and through cloudy
weather; 'tis hard to part when things are dear, bar silver, piece
cloth, bottled beer, then steal away with this short warning: choose
thine own winding-sheet, say not good-night here, but in some brighter
binding, sweet, bid me good morning.]--ALI BABA, K.C.B.

EXTRACTS FROM _SERIOUS REFLECTIONS AND OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS_.

BY "OUR POLITICAL ORPHAN."

_The Bombay Gazette Press_, 1881.

No. XXXIV

THE TEAPOT SERIES

SOCIAL DISSECTION

[January 5, 1880.]

GOSSIP I.

MY DEAR MRS. SMITH,

I cannot understand why Mrs. Smith, with her absurd figure--for really
I can apply no other adjective to it--should wear that most absurdly
tight dress. Some one