use of their unique opportunity.  Soon the church resounded with the vigorous slapping of hands on bare knees and thighs, as the men endeavoured to kill a few of their little tormentors.  The minister, hearing the loud clapping, but entirely misapprehending its purport, paused in his sermon, and said, “My brethren, it is varra gratifying to a minister of the Word to learn that his remarks meet with the approbation of his hearers, but I’d have you remember that all applause is strictly oot of place in the Hoose of God.”

The Gordon Highlanders were originally raised by my great-grandfather, the fourth Duke of Gordon, in 1794, or perhaps more accurately, by my great-grandmother, Jean, the beautiful Duchess of Gordon.  Duchess Jean, then in the height of her beauty, attended every market in the towns round Gordon Castle, and kissed every recruit who took the guinea she offered.  The French Republic had declared war on Great Britain in 1793, and the Government had made an urgent appeal for fresh levies of troops.  Duchess Jean, by her novel osculatory methods, raised the Gordons in four months.  My father and mother were married at Gordon Castle in 1832, and the wedding guests grew so excessively convivial that they carried everything on the tables at the wedding breakfast, silver plate, glass, china, and all, down to the bridge at Fochabers, and threw them into the Spey.  We may congratulate ourselves on the fact that it is no longer incumbent on wedding guests to drink the health of the newly married couple so fervently, and that a proportional saving in table fittings can thus be effected.

Barrackpore, the Viceroy’s country place, is unquestionably a pleasant spot, with its fine park and famous gardens.  Like the Maidan in Calcutta Barrackpore is a very fairly successful attempt at reproducing England in Asia.  With a little make-believe and a determined attempt to ignore the grotesque outlines of a Hindoo temple standing on the confines of the park, and the large humps on the backs of the grazing cattle like the steam domes on railway engines, it might be possible to imagine oneself at home, until the illusion is shattered in quite another fashion.  There is an excellent eighteen-hole golf course in Barrackpore park, but when you hear people talking of the second “brown” there can be no doubt but that you are in Asia.  A “green” would be a palpable misnomer for the parched grass of an Indian dry season, still a “brown” comes as a shock at first.  The gardens merit their reputation.  There are innumerable ponds, or “tanks,” of lotus and water-lilies of every hue:  scarlet, crimson, white, and pure sky-blue, the latter an importation from Australia.  When these are in flower they are a lovely sight, and perhaps compensate for the myriads of mosquitoes who find in these ponds an ideal breeding-place, and assert their presence day and night most successfully.  There are great drifts of Eucharis lilies growing under the protecting