On completion of this work he retired to Edinburgh, where most of the sketches contained in this volume were written.  He was very happy with his family in his home at Morningside, and was beginning to surround himself with pets and flowers, as was his wont all his life, and to get a good connection with the home newspapers and magazines, when, alas! death stepped in, and he died after a short illness on April 25, 1909.

He was interested in the home birds and beasts as he had been with those in India, and the last time the writer met him he was taking home some gold-fish for his aquarium.  A few days before his death he had found his way down to the Morningside cemetery, where he had been enjoying the sunshine and flowers of Spring, and he remarked to his wife that he would often go there in future to watch the birds building their nests.

Before that time came, he was himself laid to rest in that very spot in sure and certain hope of a blessed resurrection.

The above imperfect sketch fails to give the charm and magnetic attraction of the man, and for this one must go to his works, which for those who knew him are very illuminating in this respect.  In them one catches a glimpse of his plan for keeping young and cheerful in “the land of regrets,” for one of his charms was his youthfulness and interest in life.  He refused to be depressed by his lonely life.  “I am only an exile,” he remarks, “endeavouring to work a successful existence in Dustypore, and not to let my environment shape me as a pudding takes the shape of its mould, but to make it tributary to my own happiness.”  He therefore urges his readers to cultivate a hobby.

“It is strange,” he says, “that Europeans in India know so little, see so little, care so little, about all the intense life that surrounds them.  The boy who was the most ardent of bug-hunters, or the most enthusiastic of bird-nesters in England, where one shilling will buy nearly all that is known, or can be known, about birds or butterflies, maintains in this country, aided by Messrs. B. &.  S., an unequal strife with the insupportableness of an ennui-smitten life.  Why, if he would stir up for one day the embers of the old flame, he could not quench it again with such a prairie of fuel around him.  I am not speaking of Bombay people, with their clubs and gymkhanas and other devices for oiling the wheels of existence, but of the dreary up-country exile, whose life is a blank, a moral Sahara, a catechism of the Nihilist creed.  What such a one needs is a hobby.  Every hobby is good—­a sign of good and an influence for good.  Any hobby will draw out the mind, but the one I plead for touches the soul too, keeps the milk of human kindness from souring, puts a gentle poetry into the prosiest life.  That all my own finer feelings have not long since withered in this land of separation from ‘old familiar faces,’ I attribute partly to a pair of rabbits.  All rabbits are idiotic things, but these come in and