t Channapatna, but R. has to be about business in
the south again, so we go back planning our next move, and we think we
will decide on Madras! We have been a long way and a long time from the
sea, and would like to get a glimpse of it again; the thought of it is
refreshing, even though it is but a tepid eastern sea which we will have
to cross if we decide on going to Burmah or the Straits.

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

BANGALORE, 20th December.--Back to "Locksley Hall" and big rooms,
chairs, verandahs, everything feeling spacious and ample after our
quarters in the train. The three days on the line feels like weeks, so
much and so constantly have we been looking at interesting figures and
scenes.

To-night, when cheroots were going, we talked of railway matters, big
things and little things. A little thing was a dispute amongst natives
on the line, settled satisfactorily the other day. Persons involved;
gatekeepers, police, native carters and witnesses galore. The
gatekeeper, long resident in a hut of railway sleepers roofed with red
soil, surrounded by aloes, heated by the sun, and watered by nothing.
Behold his portrait in day dress; at night he envelopes his noble form
in ample, even voluminous draperies.

[Illustration]

One night, he said, two carters lifted his level-crossing gates and took
them away. Mysore State police investigate.--Report to R.; no witnesses
could be got to bear out gatekeeper's statement, and suggest gatekeeper
had been demanding toll, _i.e._ blackmail, to put into his own pocket!

_R_. asks _G.-K._!--"Why didn't you stop them taking the gates?" _G.-K._
replies, "We did!"

_R._--"Who was 'we'?"

_G.-K._--"Me and my friends and my cousins and my aunts; certainly we
stopped them--and we drubbed them too, and took them to the police
station!"

British justice makes further inquiry--finds possibly sixty rupees were
expended somewhere, to produce the "No witnesses." Action
taken--gatekeeper removed to more important trust--honesty established.

From strength of girders, cement _v_. lime, foundations of piers and
curves of lines, we come to ghosts at night! These too, the engineer has
to consider in his day's work. Only yesterday a ghost was reported on
the line! And R. told me he came down the line in a trolley in the grey
of morning lately, he vouched for this, and found on the line a
patroller's lamp and no one holding it, then a turban, then