below each door that we soon retreated to the high string-beds, and, wrapped in rugs and razais, longed for steam-heated and furnace-cheered America. The small pocket of a fireplace sheltered some hissing green twigs that smoldered and filled the room with smoke which refused to escape by a transom window sixteen feet up in the absurdly high, windward wall—which same north window was ropeless and wedged open to encourage further the icy drafts that encircled us. The khansamah, bearing the courses of the dinner, was swept in with a small gale each time, but we dined well on the usual Indian menu. The khansamah made a final entry on the wings of the wind, bearing proudly the proper British tart of conclusion. "But, missis—" he pleaded in injured tones when I too had said, "No, thanks." I had too often suffered in arguments with British pastry to hazard it in far places, but I relented to this courteous old soul and gave the heavy serving-spoon the swing and force of a golfer's club, when pouf! pou-s-sh! went a fountain spray of minute flakes of true puff-paste up into the air and down in showers all over the table. And we gathered them up— every last flimsy flakelet—and with praises consumed the khansamah's masterpiece, the very apotheosis of covered apple-pie, the most supremely perfect tart the British flag ever floated over—away off there in the shadow of the Hindu Kush, on the borderland of the heart of the world, close to the old Aryan home of the pie people's first ancestors.
"Pie, sir," said Henry Ward Beecher, "goes with
