environment would make a difference, but it really does not.  A person with a suburban mind would be as suburban in the wilds of Nepal as in the wilds of Tooting.  The illuminating thought has come to me that it isn’t a man’s environment that matters, it’s his mind.  Haven’t you often noticed in an evening in London all the City men hurrying home like rabbits to their burrows (not the prosperous City men, but the lesser ones, whose frock-coats are rather shiny and their silk hats rather dull), and haven’t you often thought how narrow their lives are, how cramping their environment?  But suppose one of those clerks loves books and is something of a poet.  What does it matter to him though his rooms in Clapham or Brixton are grimy, almost squalid, and filled with the worst kind of Victorian furniture?  “Minds innocent and quiet take such for an hermitage.”  Once inside, the long day at the office over, and the door shut on the world, an arm-chair drawn up to the fire and his books around him he is as happy as a king, for his mind to him is a Kingdom.  He may be a puny little man, in bodily presence contemptible, but he will feel no physical disabilities as he clambers on the wall of Jerusalem with Count Raymond, or thrills as he sets forth with Drake to fight Spaniards one against ten.  Instead of the raucous cries of the milk or the coal man, he hears the horns of Elfland faintly blowing, and instead of a window which can show him nothing but a sodden plot planted with wearied-looking shrubs, he has the key of that magic casement which opens on perilous seas in fairylands forlorn.  He will never do anything great in the world, he will never lead a forlorn hope, or marry the Princess, or see far lands; he will never be anything but a poor, shabby clerk, but he is of such stuff as dreams are made of, and God has given to him His fairyland.

No, I don’t think a new environment changes people, and it is foolish to think it makes them forget.  Sometimes in the Eden Gardens at sunset, when we draw up to listen to the band, I watch the faces of the youths—­Scots boys come out from Glasgow and Dundee—­dreaming there in the Indian twilight while the pipers play the tunes familiar to them since childhood.  They are sahibs out here, they have a horse to ride and a servant to look after them, things they never would have had had they stayed in Dundee or Glasgow, but though they are proud they are lonely.  What does grandeur matter if “the Quothquan folk” can’t see it?  The peepul trees rustle softly overhead, the languorous soft air laps them round, the scent of the East is in their nostrils, but their eyes are with their hearts, and is this what they see?  A night of drizzling rain, a street of tall, dingy, grey houses, and a boy, his day’s work done, bounding upstairs three steps at a time to a cosy kitchen where the tea is spread, where work-roughened hands at his coming lift the brown teapot from the hob, and a kind mother’s voice welcomes him home at the end of the day....