without emotion!  How can the tons of gold and silver plate that once belonged to John Company, Bahadur, and that now repose on the groaning board of the Great Ornamental, amid a glory of Himalayan flowers, or blossoms from Eden’s fields of asphodel, be reflected upon the eye’s retina without producing positive thrills and vibrations of joy (that cannot be measured in terms of ohm or farad) shooting up and down the spinal cord and into the most hidden seats of pleasure!  I certainly can never see the luxurious bloom of the silver sticks arranged in careless groups about the vast portals without a feeling approaching to awe and worship, and a tendency to fling small coin about with a fine mediaeval profusion.  I certainly can never drain those profound golden cauldrons seething with champagne without a tendency to break into loud expressions of the inward music and conviviality that simmer in my soul.  Salutes of cannon, galloping escorts, processions of landaus, beautiful teams of English horses, trains of private saloon carriages (cooled with water trickling over sweet jungle grasses) streaming through the sunny land, expectant crowds of beauty with hungry eyes making a delirious welcome at every stage, the whole country blooming into dance and banquet and fresh girls at every step taken—­these form the fair guerdon that stirs my breast at certain moments and makes me often resolve, after dinner, “to scorn delights and live laborious days,” and sell my beautiful soul, illuminated with art and poetry, to the devil of Industry, with reversion to Sir John Strachey.

How mysterious and delicious are the cool penetralia of the Viceregal Office!  It is the censorium of the Empire; it is the seat of thought; it is the abode of moral responsibility!  What battles, what famines, what excursions of pleasure, what banquets and pageants, what concepts of change have sprung into life here!  Every pigeon-hole contains a potential revolution; every office-box cradles the embryo of a war or dearth.  What shocks and vibrations, what deadly thrills does this little thunder-cloud office transmit to far-away provinces lying beyond rising and setting suns!  Ah!  Vanity, these are pleasant lodgings for five years, let who may turn the kaleidoscope after us.

A little errant knight of the press who has just arrived on the Delectable Mountains, comes rushing in, looks over my shoulder, and says, “A deuced expensive thing a Viceroy.”  This little errant knight would take the thunder at a quarter of the price, and keep the Empire paralytic with change and fear of change as if the great Thirty-thousand-pounder himself were on Olympus.—­Ali Baba.

No.  II

THE A.D.C.-IN-WAITING

AN ARRANGEMENT IN SCARLET AND GOLD

[Illustration:  The A.D.C.-In waiting—­“An arrangement in scarlet and gold.”]