...  We have just finished dinner—­much the most amusing dinner I ever ate.  There is an intense rivalry, it seems, between our cook and the engineer-man’s cook; and although we dined together, our bills-of-fare were kept jealously apart.  Autolycus, of course, waited on us, and when he handed me the fish, and I helped myself to one of the four pieces, he said sternly, “Two, please,” and I meekly took the other.  The engineer had no fish, but on the other hand he had an entree which was denied us.  Both cooks rose to a savoury. (They will give you the savoury before the sweet.  If you insist on anything else, it so demoralizes them that the dinner is a ruin.) Our savoury was rather ambitious—­stuffed eggs rolled in vermicelli.  It tasted rather like a bird’s-nest, and one felt it had taken a lot of making and rolling in brown hands.  I envied the simpler poached egg on tomato of the engineer.  You can’t pat a poached egg!

Rika, Feb. 9.

I have no home letters to answer this week.  We forgot to give the Calcutta people the new address, so on Monday night the dak-runner with his bells would jingle with my precious home mail into the Takai verandah; Mrs. Russel, having no other address, would re-direct them back to Calcutta, and they may reach us here about Sunday, It is tantalizing, but I don’t pine for news in Rika so much as in most places.  I am so thoroughly at home.  I find the Mofussil is simply full of nice people.  When we rode out here on Monday morning, and Mrs. Royle, with a shy small girl on either side, came down the verandah steps to meet us, I knew I was going to love staying here.  There is an atmosphere about that makes for peace and happiness, and every day I like the place and the people more.

Rika was rather a revelation.  The civilians’ bungalows have a here-we-have-no-continuing-city look about them; their owners are constantly being moved, and pitching their moving tents elsewhere; but the Royles have been at Rika for fifteen years, and have made a delightful home.  The bungalow is built on a slightly rising ground with a verandah all round—­a verandah made pleasant with comfortable chairs, rugs, writing-tables, books, and flowers.  At one end a dirzee squats with a sewing-machine, surrounded by white stuff in various stages of progress for the Mem Sahib and the children.  From the middle of the verandah a broad flight of steps, flanked on either side by growing plants in pots, leads down to the road, and across the road lie the tennis-lawns and the flower-garden.  I have read that one of the most pathetic things about this Land of Exile is the useless effort to make English flowers grow.  In Rika they must feel at home, for the whole air is scented with roses and mignonette.  When Mrs. Royle took us to see her flowers, Boggley pulled a sprig of mignonette, sniffed it appreciatively, and handing it to me said: 

“What does that remind you of?”