In one narrow street a crowd of young men are struggling violently for position about a door, where an old man is flinging handfuls of yellow powder among the crowd.  The struggling men are aspirants for the honor of having a portion of the powder alight on their persons.  I inquire of a native by-stander what it all means; the explanation is politely given, but being in the vernacular of the country, it is wasted on the unprofitable soil of my own lingual ignorance.

Impatient to be getting along, I misinterpret a gleam of illusory sunshine at noon on the third day of the rain-storm and pull out, taking a cursory glance at the Memorial Church as I go.  A drenching shower overtakes me in the native military lines, compelling me to seek shelter for an hour beneath the portico of their barracks.  The road is perfectly level and smooth, and well rounded, so that the water drains off and leaves it better wheeling than ever; and with alternate showers and sunshine I have no difficulty in covering thirty-four miles before sunset.  This brings me to a caravanserai, consisting of a quadrangular enclosure with long rows of cell-like rooms.  The whole structure is much inferior to a Persian caravanserai, but there is probably no need of the big brick structures of Shah Abbas in a winterless country like India.

Interesting subjects are not wanting for my camera through the day; but the greatest difficulty is experienced about changing the negatives at night.  A small lantern with a very feeble light, made still more feeble by interposing red paper, suffices for my own purpose; but the too attentive chowkee-dar, observing that my room is in darkness, and fancying that my light has gone out accidentally, comes flaring in with a torch, threatening the sensitive negatives with destruction.

The morning opens with a fine drizzle or extra-heavy mist that is penetrating and miserable, soaking freely into one’s clothes, and threatening every minute to change into a regular rain.  It is fourteen miles to Futtehpore, and thence two miles off the straight road to the railway-station, where I understand refreshments are to be obtained.  The reward of my four-mile detour is a cup of sloppy tea and a few weevil-burrowed biscuits, as the best the refreshment-room can produce on short notice.  The dense mist moves across the country in big banks, between which are patches of comparatively decent atmosphere.  The country is perfectly flat, devoted chiefly to the cultivation of rice, and the depressions alongside the road are, of course, filled with water.

Timid youngsters, fleeing from the road at my approach, in their scrambling haste sometimes tumble “head-over-heels” in the water; but, beyond a little extra terror lest the dreadful object they see coming bowling along should overtake them, it doesn’t matter—­they haven’t any clothes to spoil or soil.  Neither rain nor heat nor dense, reeking, foggy atmosphere seems to diminish the swarms of people on the road, nor the groups bathing or washing clothes beneath the trees.  Some of these latter make a very interesting picture.  The reader has doubtless visited the Zoo and observed one monkey gravely absorbed in a “phrenological examination” of another’s head.  With equal gravity and indifference to the world at large, dusky humans are performing a similar office for one another beneath the roadside shade-trees.