“If only,” she sometimes says, “it would go on!  The children will have to go home very soon—­the tragedy of Anglo-Indian life.”

They are such dear children, Ronald and Robert and tiny Jean.  The boys speak Santali like little natives, and even their English has an odd turn.  When little Jean was born they were greatly interested in the first white baby they had seen, and Ronald said rapturously: 

“Oh, Mummy, aren’t ladies darlings when they are babies?”

Their mother found them one day bending over the cradle, arguing as to why the baby cried.

Ronald said, “She has no teeth, for that reason she cries.”

Robert said, “She has no hair, for that reason she cries.”

And Ronald finished, “She has no English, for that reason she cries.”

I am not the only visitor at Takai.  There are two missionary ladies here, resting after a strenuous time in some famine district.  One is tall and stout, the other is short and thin; both have drab-coloured faces and straight mouse-coloured hair; both wear eye-glasses and sort of up and down dresses—­the very best of women one feels sure, but oh! so difficult.  You know my weakness for making people like me, but these dear ladies will have none of me, charm I never so wisely.  Everything I do meets with their disapproval—­how well I see it in their averted, spectacled eyes!  I talk too much, laugh too much, tell foolish tales, mimic my elders and betters, and—­worst sin of all—­I have never read, never even heard of, the Missionary Magazine.

Something you said in your last letter, some allusion to religion, I didn’t quite like, and at any other time I would have written you a sermon on the subject.  In Calcutta (where I felt so self-righteous) nothing would have prevented me—­but now I haven’t the spirit.  Mark, please, how the whirligig of Time brings its revenges!  In Calcutta I thought myself a saint, in Takai I am regarded as a Brand Unplucked.  It is rather dispiriting.  I am beginning to wonder if I really am as nice as I thought I was.

Takai, Jan. 22.

This Gorgeous East is a cold and draughty place.

We have chota-hazri in the verandah at 7.30, and at that early hour it is so cold my blue fingers will hardly lift the cup.  Now the sun is beginning to warm things into life again, and I have been sitting outside basking in its rays, to the anxiety of Mrs. Russel, who, like all Anglo-Indians, has a profound respect for the power of the Eastern sun.  The children are taught that one thing they must not do is to run out without a topi.  They were looking over The Pilgrim’s Progress with me, and at a picture of Christian, bareheaded, approaching the Celestial City, with the rays of the sun very much in evidence, Robert pointed an accusing finger, saying, “John Bunyan, you’re in the sun without your topi.”