The mail was waiting here when I came back yesterday.  Thanks so much for your letter.  I am immensely interested in all your news, but I have left myself no time to answer you properly, as this must be posted to-day.

N.B.—­The two queerest things I have noticed in Calcutta up to now are: 

(a) That when a man goes out to tennis and stays to dinner his bearer carries his dress-clothes wrapped in a towel.

(b) Kippered herrings come to the table rolled up in paper.

Calcutta, Dec. 2.

I don’t think I like this casting of bread upon the water; I never know which loaf it is I am receiving again.  You reply to things I had forgotten I had written, and it is rather bewildering.

When you get this you will be settled down in Germany.  I am sorry you have left London for one reason, and that a purely selfish one.  I shan’t be able to imagine you in your new surroundings, and in London I knew pretty well what you would be doing every minute of the day.  Knowing, as we do, many of the same people, when you wrote “I have been dining with the Maxwell-Tempests to meet the So-and-sos,” I could picture it all even to little Mrs. Maxwell-Tempest’s attitudes.  I was only in Germany once for three days, and I came away with an impression of a country weird as to food, feathery as to beds, and crammed full of soldiers; but I dare say it is a very good place to write a book.  And now—­my heartiest congratulations on having a book to write.  It sounds—­pardon me for saying it—­a very dull subject, but if I were a little wiser I expect I should see how important it is, and anyway I have enough sense to perceive that it is a great compliment to be asked to write it.  What fun to be a man and have a career!  In my more exalted moments it is sometimes borne in on me that I should have been a man and a diplomatist.  I feel, though I admit with no grounds to speak of, that I might have been a great success in that most interesting profession.  One never knows, and by putting my foot in it very conscientiously all round, I might have earned for myself a reputation of Machiavellian cunning!

What do you think I met at dinner last night?  A Travelling Radical Member of Parliament!

Of course I had read of them—­often—­and knew exactly what sort of creatures they are—­fearful wild fowl who come to India for six weeks—­

  “Comprehend in half a mo’
  What it takes a man ten years or so
  To know that he will never know,”

tell the native they want to be a brother to him, and go home to write a book about the way India is misgoverned.