ily mistook as an insinuation
that her complexion was of meretricious composition, and seeing that I
had put my foot into a _cul-de-sac_, I became once more the silent tomb,
and exhaled sighs at intervals.

Presently she declared once more that she saw, from the dullness of my
expression, that I was longing for the luxurious magnificence of my
Indian palace.

Now my domestic abode, though a respectable spacious sort of residence,
and containing my father, mother, married brothers, &c., together with a
few antique unmarried aunts, is not at all of a palatial
architecture; but it is a bad bird that blackens his own nest, and so I
merely answered that I was now so saturated with Western civilisation,
that I had lost all taste for Oriental splendours.

Next she inquired whether I did not miss the tiger-shooting and
pig-sticking; and I replied (with veraciousness, since I am not the _au
fait_ in such sports) that I could not deny a liability to miss both
tigers and pigs, and, indeed, all animals that were _ferae naturae_, and
she condemned the hazardousness of these jungle sports, and wished me to
promise that I would abstain from them on my return to India.

To this I replied that before I agreed to such a self-denying ordinance,
I desired to be more convinced of the sincerity of her interest in the
preservation of my humble existence.

Miss JESSIMINA asked what had she done that I should be in dubitation as
to her _bona fides_?

Then I did meekly remind her of her flirtatious preferences for the
young beef-witted London chaps, and her incertitude and disdainful
capriciousness towards myself, who was not a beetlehead or an obtuse,
but a cultivated native gentleman with high-class university degree, and
an oratorical flow of language which was infallibly to land me upon the
pinnacle of some tip-top judicial preferment in the Calcutta High Court
of Justice.

She made the excuse that she was compelled by financial reasons to be
pleasant to the male boarders, and that I could not expect any marked
favouritism so long as I kept my tongue concealed inside my damask cheek
like a worm in bud.

Upon which, transported by uncontrollable emotion, I ventured to embrace
her, assuring her that she was the cynosure of my neighbouring eyes, and
supplied the vacuum and long-felt want of my soul, and while occupied in
imprinting a chaste salute upon her rosebud lips--who'd have thought it!
her severe matronly parent popped in throu