coppersmith, and bung-starter, and even then he is not completely named, for when he is close by you find that there is a soft, deep, melodious quality in his thump, and for that no satisfying name occurs to you.  You will not mind his other notes, but when he camps near enough for you to hear that one, you presently find that his measured and monotonous repetition of it is beginning to disturb you; next it will weary you, soon it will distress you, and before long each thump will hurt your head; if this goes on, you will lose your mind with the pain and misery of it, and go crazy.  I am bringing some of these birds home to America.  There is nothing like them there.  They will be a great surprise, and it is said that in a climate like ours they will surpass expectation for fecundity.

I am bringing some nightingales, too, and some cue-owls.  I got them in Italy.  The song of the nightingale is the deadliest known to ornithology.  That demoniacal shriek can kill at thirty yards.  The note of the cue-owl is infinitely soft and sweet—­soft and sweet as the whisper of a flute.  But penetrating—­oh, beyond belief; it can bore through boiler-iron.  It is a lingering note, and comes in triplets, on the one unchanging key:  hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o, hoo-o-o; then a silence of fifteen seconds, then the triplet again; and so on, all night.  At first it is divine; then less so; then trying; then distressing; then excruciating; then agonizing, and at the end of two hours the listener is a maniac.

And so, presently we took to the hand-car and went flying down the mountain again; flying and stopping, flying and stopping, till at last we were in the plain once more and stowed for Calcutta in the regular train.  That was the most enjoyable day I have spent in the earth.  For rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that approaches the bird-flight down the Himalayas in a hand-car.  It has no fault, no blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty-five miles of it instead of five hundred.

CHAPTER LVII.

She was not quite what you would call refined.  She was not quite what you would call unrefined.  She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his round.  Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing over looked.  Always, when you think you have come to the end of her tremendous specialties and have finished banging tags upon her as the Land of the Thug, the Land of the Plague, the Land of Famine, the Land of Giant Illusions, the Land of Stupendous Mountains, and so forth, another specialty crops up and another tag is required.  I have been overlooking the fact that India is by an unapproachable supremacy—­the Land of Murderous Wild Creatures.  Perhaps it will be simplest to throw away the tags and generalize her with one all-comprehensive name, as the Land of Wonders.