g child would come, I
ween, to some untimely end.

7.

My Lord is, more or less, admired by two or three young ladies I know;
and when he puts his arm round my neck and drags me up and down a
crowded ball-room I cannot help wishing that they were in the pillory
instead of me. I really wish to be polite to H.E., but how can I say
that I think he was justified in finessing his deficit and playing
surpluses?

How can I agree with him when he says that Abdur Rahman will come
galloping in to Cabul to tender his submission as soon as he receives
Mr. Lepel Griffin's photograph neatly wrapped up in a Post Office
Order for two lakhs of rupees? And then that Star of India he is
always pressing on me! As I say to him,--what should I do with it?

I can't go hanging things round my neck like King Coffee Calcalli, or
the Emperor of Blue China.

But soon it will not be difficult for me to avoid my Lord: for

"Sic desideriis icta fidelibus
Quaerit patria Caesarem."

8.

He still smiles when we meet; and I don't think any the less of him
because he was called "Bumble" at school and afterwards made Governor
of Bombay. Men drift unconsciously into these things. But when I
happen to be near him he has a nervous way of lunging with his stick
that I can't quite get over. They say he once dreamt that I had poked
fun at him in a newspaper; and the hallucination continues to produce
an angry aberration of his mind, coupled with gnashing of the teeth
and other dangerous symptoms.

9.

He is a huge gob of flesh, which is perhaps animated dimly by some
spark of humanity smouldering filthily in a heart cancerous with
money-grubbing. His whole character and mode of life stink with
poisonous exhalations in my moral nostrils. Nature denounces, in her
loud commination service, his clammy hand, his restless eye, his
sinister and bestial mouth. Why should he waken me from the dreams of
literature and the low music of my own reflections to disgorge from
the cesspool of his mind the impertinent questions and the loathsome
compliments which form his notion of conversation? He has come to "pay
his respects." I abhor "his respects." He is rich:--What is that to
me? He is powerful with all the power of corruption: I scorn his
power, I figuratively spit upon it. He is perhaps the man whom the
Government delights to honour. More shame to the Government! A bully
at home, and a tyrant among his own people, on all sides dastar