selves to much, rheumatism, lumbago* and kindred ills.
As I returned across the lake to my pretty Gupcar home
after my farewell visit to the city, it was with the feeling
that I was saying good-bye not only to a most beautiful
land, richly endowed with Nature’s best and rarest gifts,
but to a people happy in their government, and with
every encouragement to improve their condition; a
people who, after centuries of a terrible black tunnel
of misery, anarchy, and oppression, had emerged on the
sunny side of the hill.
In my last chapter I will speak of the country as it
affects European residents.
CHAPTEE XX
We flash across the level,
We thunder thro’ the bridges,
We bicker down the cuttings,
We sway along the ridges.
A rush of streaming hedges,
Of jostling lights and shadows,
Of hurtling, hurrying stations,
Of racing woods and meadows.
— Henley.
Of joltings and jarrings—Wild ponies and fa ir ways—A gentleman
in k h ak i discusses the empire with one of the holy
army _ T h e seamy side of an Indian summer—Homeward
bound.
T h e last hours of my stay in the Happy Valley had
arrived, and long before the sun rose to wake the
inhabitants to another gorgeous day, I should be on my
way, the first stage of a weary, toilsome journey that,
with but few hours’ rest here and there on my passage
through India, I was to accomplish without break from
Srinagar to London during the hottest time of the year,
and under the torturing conditions of an unbroken
monsoon. With such an early start before me it seemed
an unnecessary torment of the flesh to go to bed at all,
but the consideration of those two hundred miles to