So I prepared to make for Simla, which, however, I never saw, nor had occasion to see, my liver complaint seeming to have been left behind, with my good wishes, in the City of Palaces.  In the early days of Indian civilization to which I refer the most convenient way of journeying on high-roads was by palanquin.  One of the black packing-cases so called was purchased, and an arrangement entered into, after the custom of the country, with the post-office to have relays of bearers provided on the road at stated times and places.  Thus, I was to go as far as Ghazeepore, where I had a friend living, and there I was to give due notice if I wished to proceed farther.  Traveling in India has so frequently been a subject of description that I shall not describe it anew.  I allow myself, however, to say that if, before venturing on it, you lay in a stock of boiled tongues, sardines, marmalade, and tea and sugar, you could not do better by way of forestalling starvation and repentance.  Every day I stopped once or twice at a travelers’ bungalow, or rest-house; and I managed, notwithstanding that my stock of Urdu was scanty, to make my wants understood.  That a great part of the copious monologue which my purveyors expended, as we settled the details of breakfast or dinner, was lost on me, did not seem, in the final result, to matter in the least.  What I needed I asked for, and then listened attentively for the barbaric representative of “yes” or “no” in the Babel of sounds that followed, neglecting the flux of verbiage that engulfed it with the same lofty indifference which a mathematician professes toward infinitely small quantities.  With a view to avoiding cross-purposes there is nothing like economy of speech.  But how my tawny hosts could contrive to realize such a fortune of talk out of their very meagre capital of subject-matter excited my never-ending wonder.  They could provide forlorn pullets, certainly from the same farmyard with the lean kine of Egypt, and to these they could add, what was much better left unadded, a villainous species of unleavened bread, a sort of hoecake, not at all improved—­precisely like the run of travelers—­by leaving home and wandering in the Orient.  And this was about all they could provide.  But, I repeat, how could expatiate on them!  And how bespattered one with compound epithets of adulation!

A friend of mine, a lady, when fresh in the country once compromised herself rather astonishingly by lending an ear to their multiloquence, instead of resolutely refusing her attention to all communication but that consisting of “yea, yea,” and “nay, nay.”  She had noted down, in her tablets, the Urdu wherewith to ask whether a thing is procurable, and to order it, if procurable, to be forthcoming, with the appropriate outlandish words for “pullet” and “hoecake,” and also those for straightforward answers, affirmative and negative.  She was certain that with this lingual accoutrement she could not possibly be taken at a disadvantage.  The experience of