es, a Chinaman to every three
ponies. At the end stalks a lean Indian. I suppose he owns the show--his
wife follows, a very black thing, a Madrassee, to judge by her not very
white and inelegant hangings. They drink and spit at the spring, and he
sees us and salaams, and looks in to see the durwan, who is one of his
countrymen.

[Illustration]

But now we must be jogging too, though it is pleasant here. We leave one
sowar behind, in pain he says, but I doubt if he's very ill. So we get
on to our rather big polo ponies, one black, the other white, and go
down the valley on the path to China--said bridle path quite dry now
excepting under bamboo clumps, though it rained hard in the night.

7 P.M.--Kulong Cha--"There's no place like home" they say, and I thought
so; now I think there is, perhaps even better. Our own highlands must
have been like this before General Wade and Sir Walter Scott opened them
to the tourist; the Pass of Leny or where Bran meets Tay, when there was
more forest, and only bridle tracks, and men going armed, must have been
like this, even to the free fishing and shooting.

We are in a cup-shaped wooden glen, our rest-house eighty feet up the
hillside above the track, and a brawling burn that meets the Taiping a
few hundred yards beyond our halting place. The burn suggests good
fishing, and the Taiping looks like a magnificent salmon river. It is 7
P.M. and Krishna busy setting dinner, and your servant writing these
notes to the sound of many waters and by a candle dimly burning, for the
sun has gone below the wooded hills and left us in a soft gloom. Several
camp fires begin to twinkle along the road where the caravans we
overtook, and others from the east, are preparing for the night. Our
Chinese coolies too have their fires going near us, the smoke helping to
soften the already blurred evening effect. We have had, for us, a long
afternoon's ride--a little tiring and hot in the bottom of the valley
when the path came down to the Taiping river,--a winding and twisting
path, round little glens to cross foaming burns, level enough for a
hundred yards canter, then down, and up, hill sides in zigzags, here and
there wet and muddy with uncertain footing, through groves of bamboos
and under splendid forest trees, some creepers hanging a hundred feet
straight as plumb lines, others twisted like wrecked ships' cables, and
flowering trees, with delicious scent every hundred yards or so. We felt
inclined t