dismal tone. I was rather enjoying them. I always like things like fireworks—bright and fizzy and beautiful and not too long.
'To Delhi,' he said, and positively groaned about it. 'To Delhi in general and to the fireworks in particular.'
'You can't think why you came to Delhi?' I repeated, looking at him to see if he really were serious. He certainly was original. Everybody I had met hitherto had been lauding everything up to the skies. Sir Peter Tweet was the first man I had met who didn't know why he had come.
He turned and looked at me solemnly.
'It ought never to have been allowed,' he said ponderously, as if he were delivering judgment. 'It ought never to have been allowed. It's a positive danger to human life.'
'Which?' I exclaimed, 'the Durbar or the fireworks?' He had such a weighty manner with him that anybody imaginative like me began to feel danger to human life hovering about in the air all round one straight away.
He waved his hand over the Champs de Mars.
'Could anything be more dangerous than that?' he asked impressively, 'or than this?' waving his hand over the orderly, highly respectable crowd of spectators in the Jumma Musjid. A huge rocket went off with a whizz that positively made me start.
'But why?' I exclaimed, battling against the growing conviction that somehow it must be very dangerous if Sir Peter Tweet said it was. If the Government of India listened to his words with
