Since then we have been through dry places, and camped in desolate places, hardly ever seeing a European, and enjoying ourselves extremely.  One day, a red-letter day, Boggley shot two crocodiles.  One was a fish-eater, but the other was a great old mugger, most loathsome to look at.  Autolycus hoped for human limbs inside it, and I believe they did actually find relics of his gruesome meals in the shape of anklets and rings and bangles.  Boggley is going to have the skins made up into things for me, but it will take about six months to cure them.  It is good to think there is one mugger the less.  I hate the nasty treacherous beasts.  Pretending they are logs, and then eating the poor natives!

One night we had a delightful camping-ground on the edge of a lochan well stocked with duck, which Boggley set out to shoot and ended by missing gloriously.  We were much embarrassed by a fat old landowner heaping presents on us.  He nearly wept when we refused to accept a goat!

All the fortnight we have only met two Europeans—­a couple called Martin.  I don’t know quite what they were, or why they were holding up the flag of empire in this lonely outpost, but they were the greyest people I ever saw.

Finding ourselves in the neighbourhood of Europeans, we called, as in duty bound.  The compound round the bungalow had a dreary look, and when we were shown into the drawing-room I could see at a glance it was a room that no one took any interest in.  The rugs on the floor were rumpled, the cushions soiled; photographs stood about in broken frames, and the flowers were dying in their glasses.  When Mrs. Martin came in, I wasn’t surprised at her room.  A long grey face, lack-lustre eyes, greyish hair rolled up anyhow, and greyish clothes with a hiatus between the bodice and skirt.  “This,” said I to myself, “is a woman who has lost interest in herself and her surroundings,” Her husband was small and bleached-looking and, given encouragement, inclined to be jokesome; sometimes (by accident) he was funny.  Mrs. Martin paid very little attention to us, and none whatever to her husband’s jokes.  I laughed loudly.  I thought it was so persevering of him to go on trying to be funny when he was married to such a depressing woman.  As we got up to go I noticed in a corner a child’s chair with a little chintz cover, and seated in it a smiling china doll lacking one arm and a leg.

I could hardly wait till I was outside to tell Boggley what I thought of Mrs. Martin and her house.  “The hopeless, untidy creature!” I raved.  “She doesn’t deserve to have such a little cheery husband or children.”

The only thing I don’t like about Boggley is that he never will help me to abuse people.

“Poor woman,” he said; “she’s pretty bad.”  Then he told me her story as he had heard it.

Ten years ago, it seems, she was quite a cheery managing woman, with two little girls whom she worshipped; she and her husband lived for the children.  They were just going to take them home when they sickened with some ailment.  Mr. Martin at the time was prostrate after a bad attack of fever.  There was no doctor within thirty miles.  One child died, and the mother started with the other on the long drive to the nearest doctor.  The last ten miles it was a dead child she held in her arms.