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214
WINTER INDIA

roamed the portico in pajamas and long ulster, smoking a German student pipe. We removed forthwith to another hotel, that had once been a splendid official residence. Our rooms opened by long windows upon a cement terrace flush with the battlements of the city walls, and from that high parapet we looked down upon the Jumna and green wooded spaces where the jackals howled all night and wherein are laid some of the scenes of "On the Face of the Waters." The entrance portico of the mansion was used as a dining-room, the great stone arches partly closed at night by bamboo blinds, ventilated curtains that swayed and swung in the drafts and breezes which blew over us as we dined there, practically out of doors, on those cold January nights, with the humidity great and the thermometer registering 38 to 40 degrees.

"It is a land of misery," cried a great American litterateur who was doing India with a rapidity unequaled by any personally conducted tourist. "All I want to do is to get out of it; to get away; to get something an American stomach is used to eating; to get some Apollinaris instead of this hygienic soda; to get warm again. If I get within one hundred miles of any place, I will say I have seen it. I don't want any more architecture at this price." And this tirade was in the same key and vein indulged in by all the coughing, sneezing, rheumatic, and neuralgic tourists. All were cross, half ill, and thoroughly homesick in this chill land of supposed tropic splendors.

When the sour mists or the frost hazes of those