liberal, they trotted off with unwonted briskness.  In due course the bungalow loomed in sight, and as I approached it a burly figure, in shirt-sleeves and with arms akimbo, appeared in the verandah, his eyes turned in the direction of his unlooked-for visitor.  “God bless you, Hugh Maxwell!  I’m devilish glad to see you,” shouted the burly figure, benedictory, but even in benediction not oblivious of the Old Teaser.  “I wish to Goodness I was Hugh Maxwell!” I returned, stepping to the ground.  “Oh, never mind,” rejoined the hearty indigo-planter, perceiving his mistake and offering me his hand.  “There is just time for a bath before breakfast,” he added; and a good tubbing, in sufficient light to see and evade creeping things by, was far from unacceptable.  I stayed with my good-natured host two days and nights, picking up, in the mean while, much curious information touching the cultivation and manufacture in which he was occupied.  Like most persons of his calling, he was an ardent sportsman.  The early hours of the morning he gave almost daily to a stroll with his gun; and the first evening I passed with him he invited me, in startlingly piebald phraseology, to accompany him on the morrow.  “Be up by top dage,” said he:  “we will have chhoti haziri, and then a chal over the khets for some shikar” Why he did not prefer to say “gun-fire,” “tea and toast,” “run,” “fields,” and “game,” probably he could not have told himself.  His way of peppering his English with Urdu was characteristic of his class, and till I got accustomed to it I found it somewhat perplexing.  If he had known me all his life he could not have been more friendly.  Yet his kindness and hospitality were not exceptional things in the India of a quarter of a century ago.  All is changed there now—­whether much for the better I am skeptical.  Twenty-two hours after they were due my missing bearers made their appearance.  Arrived at Ghazeepore, I addressed a complaint to the postmaster-general.  Thereupon two sides of a large sheet of paper were spread for me with base official circumlocution, through the darkness of which I groped out, after some labor, the audacious libel that the blame, if there were any, rested entirely with myself.  This stuff, signed by the functionary aforesaid, but doubtless concocted without his privity by one of his graceless subordinates, I knew to be the only satisfaction I was to look for.  A request for revision of judgment would have been received with silent scorn, and appeal there was none.  Digesting my disgust as best I could, I lighted my cheroot with the mendacious foolscap and blushed for my species.