anecdotes of
him that occasionally came to my ears, it would seem he created the
impression that he habitually waded in knee-deep gore, and that he was
in the habit of contemplating with equanimity battle-fields littered
with the slaughtered combatants. John was quite the small lion of the
hour. He had very graceful ways, and great skill in making tasteful
bouquets. These he would present to the ladies of the household when
they came downstairs of a morning, with a graceful salaam, and the
expression of a hope that they had slept well. The spectacle of John,
seen from the drawing-room windows of Chevening, Lord Stanhope's seat in
Kent, as he swaggered across the park to church one Sunday morning in
frock coat and silk hat, with a buxom cook on one arm and a tall and
lean lady's maid on the other, will never be effaced from the
recollection of those who witnessed it with shrieks of laughter.

[Illustration: "A BUXOM COOK ON ONE ARM AND LEAN LADY'S MAID ON THE
OTHER."]

In those days I lived in a flat, my modest establishment consisting of
an old female housekeeper and John. For the most part my two domestics
were good friends, but there were periods of estrangement during which
they were not on speaking terms; and then they sat on opposite sides of
the kitchen table, and communicated with each other exclusively by
written notes of an excessively formal character, passed across the
table. This stiffness of etiquette had its amusing side, but was
occasionally embarrassing, since neither was uniformly intelligible with
the pen. The result was that sometimes I got no dinner at all, and at
other times, when I was dining alone, the board groaned with the
profusion, and when I had company there would not be enough to go round;
these awkwardnesses arising from the absence of a good understanding
between my two domestics. I could not part with the old female servant,
and I began rather to tire of John, whose head had become considerably
swollen because of the notice which had been taken of him. It was all
very well to be in a position to gratify ladies who were giving dinner
parties, and who wrote me little notes asking for the loan for a few
hours of John, to make that wonderful prawn curry of which he had the
sole recipe. But John used to return from that culinary operation very
late, and with indications that his beverage during his exertions had
not been wholly confined to water. To my knowledge he had a wife in Goa,
yet I