heart the mysterious subtle influence of the East. Wherever I am if I close my eyes I shall see it again. There will flash past as in a dream the long bare dusty roads, with their fitful flow of traffic crawling lazily beneath the blinding midday sun in a cloudless sky, the heavy ponderous carts creaking as the bullocks with mild complaining eyes sway drowsily from side to side, and the driver sleeps at his post; the tiny mud-built straw-thatched village, a jumble of huts, creeper-grown, crouched in the shade of the palm; the little brown urchins rolling in the sun and the dust, naked and unashamed in a row of beads or a single string round the waist, tied, as the mother will tell you, to warn the child when he has eaten his fill, and more will bring remorse; the silent women in their bright gay saris, with their own inimitable grace returning from the well, their water-pots poised easily upon their heads or quietly preparing the evening meal against their lord's return; the sweet all-restful sound of the cowbells along the slopes of the hills as the cattle wend their homeward way, the deep, low musical notes of the wooden bells answering the merry tinkling of the metal ones from hill to hill; and the shimmering haze of the fleeting eastern twilight as the blood-red sun sets slowly in a blaze of gold and purple and orange and rose and green, and leaves the world to slumber. Even the smell of it all—the indescribable smell of the East—seemed to creep into my nostrils as I gazed my last at the receding coast, and drew me back to that mystic land.
And then the thought flashed across me. It
