I don’t know if I really like a tent to live in.  The floor is covered with straw, and then a carpet is stretched over it, which makes a particularly bulgy, uneven surface to stand dressing-tables and things on.  The straw, too, is apt to stick out where it is least expected, and gives one rather the feeling of being a tinker sleeping in a barn.  At night a tent is an awesome place.  It is terrible to have no door to lock, and to be entirely at the mercy of anything that creeps and crawls; to have only a mosquito-net between you and an awful end.  I woke last night to hear something sniffing outside the tent.  It scraped and scraped, and I was sure that it was digging a hole and creeping underneath the canvas.  I sat up in bed and in a quavering voice said “Go away,” and the noise stopped, but only to begin again—­scrape, scrape, snuffle, snuffle, in the most eerie way.  Then something worse happened.  At my very ear, as it seemed, the most blood-curdling yell rent the astonished air.  It was only a jackal, Boggley says, but it sounded as if all the forces of evil had been let loose at once.  You can laugh if you like, but I think it was enough to frighten a very Daniel.  As for me, in one moment I was well under the blankets, with fingers in both ears, and I suppose even in the midst of my terror I must have fallen asleep, for the next thing I knew was daylight and the cheerful sound of voices.  To-night I shall have a lamp burning and a chokidar (watchman) to sleep outside my tent.

Baratah is quite a large town, and has a Roman Catholic Mission and two lady doctors.  We are camping about a mile from the town in a corner of Mr. Lister’s compound.  It is pretty, with well-kept grass and flower-beds, and opposite is the Guest House of the Raj, where we would be staying now were it not that its roof is not quite safe, and it cannot be used.  I went through it, and a great neglected place it is, with tawdry Early Victorian furniture and awful oleographs.

When the sun had gone down yesterday, we went for a walk to explore, along an avenue of peepul trees, across a fine polo-ground, and then we lighted on a big tank.  A tiny native boy was perched on the bank watching something in the water, so we sat down beside him and watched too.  The something was very large and black, and we were puzzled to know what it was, till, at a word from the child, it heaved itself out of the water and revealed itself an elephant.  Up it came to where we were, laid its trunk down so that the small boy could walk up, and off he went proudly riding on its head.  It was the nicest thing to watch I ever saw.

We got the home mail the night we arrived here, but couldn’t see to read it till the next morning.  So you are back in London—­sloppy, muggy, February London!  How you will miss the cold clear North and all the ice-fun; but you will be so busy finishing the book that surroundings won’t matter much.  It seemed quite home-like to see the familiar address on the note-paper.