llocks; the carts and harness
glistened with vermilion, sky blue, and gold details; the driver, black
of course, in livery, with a boy carrying a white yak's tail in
black-buck's horn to brush away flies. I was sorry to miss seeing these
kind people, but hope to get over the effect of sun, plus cold baths,
and return their calls, and so increase my stock of first impressions of
Indian life. "Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions," Mr Aberich
Mackay calls them in his "Twenty-one days in India," that most amusing
Indian classic. "What is it these travelling people put on paper?" he
adds. "Let me put it in the form of a conundrum. Q. What is it that the
travelling M.P. treasures up and what the Anglo-Indian hastens to throw
away? A. Erroneous, hazy, distorted first impressions. Before the eyes
of the griffin, India steams in poetical mists, illusive, fantastic, and
subjective." Crushing to the new comer, is it not. And he adds that his
victim, the M.P., "is an object at once pitiable and ludicrous, and this
ludicrous old Shrovetide cock, whose ignorance and information leave two
broad streaks of laughter in his wake, is turned loose upon the reading
public." This is as funny as Crosland at his best, say his round arm hit
at Burns, the "incontinent and libidinous ploughman with a turn for
verse"--a sublime bladder whack! But listen also to the poor victim, Mr
Wilfred Blunt, M.P., and what he has to say in the "Contemporary
Review."

"I became acquainted in a few weeks with what the majority of our
civilian officers spend their lives in only half suspecting. My
experience has been that of a tourist, but I have returned satisfied
that it is quite possible to see, hear, and understand all that vitally
concerns our rule in India in six months' time."

After all, who may write about India? Major Jones said to me the other
day, "Why on earth is Smith writing about India--what does he know? he
is just out; why! I've been here over ten years and have just learned I
know nothing."

Then I said, "What about General Sir A. B. Blank's writings?" Blank is
going home after about forty years in India. "Oh! good gracious," he
said, "Blank's ideas are hopeless--utterly antiquated!" Therefore no one
may write about India; Smith is too inexperienced, Jones has only
learned he knows nothing, and General Blank is too antiquated.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This day we spent calling round th