But, though the Viceroy did nothing to check Wonder’s officiousness, other people said unpleasant things.  May be the Members of Council began it; but finally all Simla agreed that there was ’too much Wonder and too little Viceroy’ in that rule.  Wonder was always quoting ‘His Excellency.’  It was ‘His Excellency this,’ ’His Excellency that,’ ‘In the opinion of His Excellency,’ and so on.  The Viceroy smiled; but he did not heed.  He said that, so long as his old men squabbled with his ‘dear, good Wonder,’ they might be induced to leave the Immemorial East in peace.

‘No wise man has a Policy,’ said the Viceroy.  ’A Policy is the blackmail levied on the Fool by the Unforeseen.  I am not the former, and I do not believe in the latter.’

I do not quite see what this means, unless it refers to an Insurance Policy.  Perhaps it was the Viceroy’s way of saying.  ‘Lie low.’

That season came up to Simla one of these crazy people with only a single idea.  These are the men who make things move; but they are not nice to talk to.  This man’s name was Mellish, and he had lived for fifteen years on land of his own, in Lower Bengal, studying cholera.  He held that cholera was a germ that propagated itself as it flew through a muggy atmosphere; and stuck in the branches of trees like a wool-flake.  The germ could be rendered sterile, he said, by ‘Mellish’s Own Invincible Fumigatory’—­a heavy violet-black powder—­’ the result of fifteen years’ scientific investigation, Sir !’

Inventors seem very much alike as a caste.  They talk loudly, especially about ‘conspiracies of monopolists’; they beat upon the table with their fists; and they secrete fragments of their inventions about their persons.

Mellish said that there was a Medical ‘Ring’ at Simla, headed by the Surgeon-General, who was in league, apparently, with all the Hospital Assistants in the Empire.

I forget exactly how he proved it, but it had something to do with ‘skulking up to the Hills’; and what Mellish wanted was the independent evidence of the Viceroy—­’Steward of our Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, Sir.’  So Mellish went up to Simla, with eighty-four pounds of Fumigatory in his trunk, to speak to the Viceroy and to show him the merits of the invention.

But it is easier to see a Viceroy than to talk to him, unless you chance to be as important as Mellishe of Madras.  He was a six-thousand-rupee man, so great that his daughters never ‘married.’  They ‘contracted alliances.’  He himself was not paid.  He ’received emoluments,’ and his journeys about the country were ’tours of observation.’  His business was to stir up the people in Madras with a long pole—­as you stir up tench in a pond—­and the people had to come up out of their comfortable old ways and gasp—­’This is Enlightenment and Progress.  Isn’t it fine!’ Then they give Mellishe statues and jasmine garlands, in the hope of getting rid of him.