David's bandy turned in at the gates—and yet another eerie quarter of an hour while the bandy drivers muttered in the near darkness, and our two protectors pounded and shouted at a far-away door. The moon struggled out in rare glimpses and gave us suggestion now and then of a great lawn and trees, a long, low, white building whose eaves extended over a continuous flagged porch—the regulation rest-house built by government for the use of traveling officials and other Europeans.
A babel of angry voices came from the back of the compound, the loud talk and back talk, the incessant wrangle and jangle of untuned bells and Hindu servants, the most quarrelsome lower class in the world, after the Chinese. Their bickerings are an annoyance that frets the spirit and wears the nerves of the most adamantine traveler, and it is no wonder that the Buddha, and all saints and reformers, first fled to the jungle for years of silent meditation. The keeper of the bangla appeared with his keys and a lantern. "Oh, yes, certingly, memsahib," he had received the telegram in due time and had tightly locked up the bangla and his own quarters and gone soundly to sleep—Hindu irresponsibility, ungraciousness, and indifference to the usual degree.
The door clanged open and showed us the regulation lofty, cheerless, cement-floored room, as fit for prison as superior occupancy. One remembered those creepy "other stories" of Rudyard Kipling where lunatics and delirium tremens subjects habited, and suicides took themselves off in, just such
