in everybody's confidence, and the spinster fresh from
home, and the bean-fed, well-groomed subaltern with the light coat and
fox-terrier. On the benches sat the fat colonel, and the large judge,
and the engineer's wife, and the merchant-man and his family after their
kind--male and female met I them, and but for the little fact that they
were entire strangers to me, I would have saluted them all as old
friends. I knew what they were talking about, could see them taking
stock of one another's dresses out of the corners of their eyes, could
see the young men backing and filling across the ground in order to walk
with the young maidens, and could hear the "Do you think so's" and "Not
really's" of our polite conversation. It is an awful thing to sit in a
hired carriage and watch one's own people, and know that though you know
their life, you have neither part nor lot in it.

"I am a shadow now; alas! alas!
Upon the skirts of human nature dwelling,"

I said mournfully to the Professor. He was looking at Mrs. ----, or some
one so like her that it came to the same thing. "Am I travelling round
the world to discover _these_ people?" said he. "I've seen 'em all
before. There's Captain Such-an-one and Colonel Such-another and Miss
What's-its-name as large as life and twice as pale."

The Professor had hit it. That was the difference. People in Singapur
are dead-white--as white as Naaman--and the veins on the backs of their
hands are painted in indigo.

It is as though the Rains were just over, and none of the womenfolk had
been allowed to go to the hills. Yet no one talks about the
unhealthiness of Singapur. A man lives well and happily until he begins
to feel unwell. Then he feels worse because the climate allows him no
chance of pulling himself together--and then he dies. Typhoid fever
appears to be one gate of death, as it is in India; also liver. The
nicest thing in the civil station which lies, of course, far from the
native town, and boasts pretty little bungalows--is Thomas--dear,
white-robed, swaggering, smoking, swearing Thomas Atkins the
unchangeable, who listens to the band and wanders down the bazaars, and
slings the unmentionable adjective about the palm trees exactly as
though he were in Mian Mir. The 58th (Northamptonshire) live in these
parts; so Singapur is quite safe, you see.

Nobody would speak to me in the gardens, though I felt that they ought
to have invited me to drink, and I crept back to m