ine as we went,
an extremely pleasant mode of procedure, with a certain dignity about it
that is absent in a railway carriage. We sit in front on comfortable
seats, a red flag on a bamboo overhead, a fat stationmaster and two
natives behind, and two on the rails to shove, the shadow of the whole
show running along beside us outlined on the ballast and sunny cactus
hedge.

[Illustration]

The first miles were over somewhat sandy, gravelly ground, then through
groves of palms, and mostly down hill. At this comfortable rate we had
time to look at the field workers in the rice crops, the palms with
their skirts of creepers, and flowering thornbrakes, and the "bits" of
the yellow corn and hedges and flat fields, that one might have seen on
any summer's day in England. The reapers were in groups and lines in the
greenish corn, the men bronze and bare to the waistcloths, the women in
many-coloured draperies, Ruths and reapers and Boazes by the dozen, with
the women's bangles gleaming, and the men's sickles glittering in the
cheerful sunlight.

Seringapatam is on an island three miles long, in the Cauvery River;
outside it we were met by a victoria and drove about the island. It is a
pleasant place to spend a day; the marks of our forefathers' gunnery on
the walls gives quite a homely feeling. You see where they camped and
the river they looked at--a gentle-running, sapphire stream with
yellow-grey stones showing across it, not much more than a hundred yards
across when we saw it--and the big double masonry wall beyond it which
they battered and scaled. Barring the trees and bushes that have grown
on the walls, the battering looks as if it had only been done yesterday.
We spent the morning going over the walls, without a guide or
guide-book, trying to pick up the hang of the situation from what we had
heard and read of the siege. There is pleasant park-land inside the
walls, with beautiful tall trees, but the view that fascinates is from
the walls across the river towards the points where the British guns
were fired from, and from which the assault was made. Later in the day
the stationmaster, Bubbaraya Moodeliar, gave us a copy of a guide he has
written, such an excellent, concise description of the place and its
history. It was pleasant to find so many of our countrymen's names on
the first pages, and at the risk of being tedious, my friends, they are
here; the names as they occur in this "Short History of the Siege and
A