embarked with mattresses, chairs, a few pots and pans and provisions from the hotel, and a great supply of our own stores to augment the tiffin-basket. Instead of driving to Marmalong or Guindy Bridge, and trusting to meet the dilatory boatmen there, we embarked at Governor's Basin, and for reward found the Buckingham Canal drag a stagnant, sewery way past Madras commons and dead walls, past hedges and kitchen-gardens, for six miles to Guindy Bridge, where the open country began. We posted a letter in the mail-box at the bridge, ordering a carriage to be waiting there at five o'clock the second morning, and then were towed and poled at a comfortable gait southward through the long, lazy afternoon, curtained from the western sun, with a fresh little breeze from the sea pleasantly stirring the air.
It was a fiat, level country, lying close to the Coromandel coast. Once the canal debouched into a great lagoon, and the trackers plashed like a file of storks across a few miles of shallow water, and often we heard the long boom of the breakers. Villages nestled under palm and banian groves; villagers trod the high embankment paths like so many white storks or red flamingos; and market, cargo, and fire-wood boats slipped silently by. We walked past a series of locks in the late afternoon, and when the great triangular sail dropped we took our chairs to the roof and glided down such a sunset stretch as met one's ideal of the tropics. Two Tamil coolies, tandem, towed us; a tall boatman poled; and Daniel's brilliant red turban at the fore gave the high keynote to the sunset color scheme, while his voice rose
