saying to Brahmins, ’And you are Muscleman, aren’t you, or are you a Dhobi?’ and to Parsis, ’I suppose you High Caste gentlemen have to bathe every day?’ shoving their awful ignorance under the noses of everybody, and inquiring after the healths of the ‘chief wives’.  Silly fatuous geese!—­and then talking the wildest piffle about the ’burning question of the hour’ and making the seditious rotters groan at their ineptitude and folly, until they cheer them up sudden-like with a bit of dam’ treason and sedition they ought to be jailed for. Jailed.  I nearly threw a fit when the old geezer, in a blaze of diamonds and glory, brought up old Phossy and presented him to the Gander, and he murmured:—­

“‘My deah friend,’ as Phossy held on to his paw in transports, ’to think of their casting you into jail,’ and old Mother Potiphar squeaked:  ’Oh, this is not the forger of that name—­but the eminent politeecian’.  But poor Gosly had thought he had been a political prisoner!  Meant no offence.  And then some little squirt of an editor primed him with lies about the University and the new syllabus, and straightway the Gander tried to get me on the ‘embarrass the Government’ lay, and talked as though he knew all about it.  ’I’ll get some of the ladies of my committee sent out here as History-lecturers at your University,’ says he.  ’They’ll teach pure Liberal History and inculcate true ideas of liberty and self-government.’  I wanted to go outside and be ill.  Good old ’Paget M.P.’—­takes up a ‘Question’ and writes a silly pamphlet on it and thinks he’s said the last word.—­Written thousands.—­Don’t matter so long as he does it in England.—­Just the place for him nowadays.—­But when he feels he’s shoved out of the lime-light by a longer-haired Johnny, it’s rough luck that he should try and get back by spending his blooming committee’s money coming here and deludin’ the poor seditionist and seducin’ your Hatter from his allegiance to his salt....  Awful old fraud really—­no ability whatever.  Came to my college to spout once, in my time.  Lord!  Still he was a guest, and we let him go.  Run by his missus really, I think.  Why can’t she stop at home and hammer windows?  They say she went and asked the Begum of Bhopal to join her in a ‘mission and crusade’.  Teach the Zenana Woman and Purdah Lady to Come Forth instead of Bring Forth.  Come Forth and smash windows.  Probably true.  Silly Goslings.  Drop ’em....  What did you think of our bowling yesterday?  With anything like a wicket your College should be....”

* * * * *

Entering his lonely and sequestered bungalow that evening Mir Ilderim Dost Mahommed changed his Pathan dress for European dining-kit, removed his beard and wig, and became Mr. Robin Ross-Ellison.  After dinner he wrote to the eminent Cold weather Visitor to India, Mr. Cornelius Gosling-Green, as follows—­

“DEAR SIR,

“As I promised this afternoon, when you graciously condescended to honour me with your illuminating conversation, I enclose the papers which I guaranteed would shed some light on certain aspects of Indian conditions, and which I consider likely to give you food for thought.