the man to organise and lead a large expedition through such difficult country of which he had no previous experience. By this time I had had several talks with Sarat Chandra Das, who was to have accompanied us as a Tibetan interpreter, but who, owing to some friction or misunderstanding between himself and Macaulay, now flatly refused to go. In consequence we should have been dependent on the services of a youth from the school at Darjeeling, who, whatever his knowledge of colloquial Tibetan might have been, seemed quite unlit for such a difficult and responsible post as that of translator and interpreter to a political and commercial embassy.
Sarat Chandra Das never would tell me anything definite about what had passed in Pekin or since, though, knowing that I was not in the Indian Service but independent of Macaulay's present or future goodwill, he talked more freely to me than to the other members of the Mission. He seemed to have private sources of information, and though I never thought that, to use a common expression, he “funked the job,” yet I could see that he was not at all sanguine of our success.
At the end of May, though the rains had not yet become persistent, there were many heavy showers and moths began to appear in great numbers and variety at the camp and in the station. I spent my time between the Club at Darjeeling and Mongpo, and as I had no regular occupation I determined to make my collection as complete as possible. In this I was materially aided, first by my friend Mandelli, who allowed me to select many rarities from his collection, secondly by Gammie, who was still in charge at Mongpo, and lastly by Mr. A. Knyvett, at that time Superintendent of Police in the Jelpigori district, who had collected largely both in the Terai and at Darjeeling, where he often stayed.
The best account I know of collecting moths in tropical regions is in Wallace’s Malay Archipelago, where he describes his work in Borneo. Though his success was great, I think my own was even greater. I found, as he did, that the best nights for taking moths at a light were warm, dark and wet nights in the rainy season, and that the best situation for the light was an open verandah with a white wall and low roof overlooking a considerable extent of country, so that moths can be attracted from a great distance. The verandah of the Club at Darjeeling had all these advantages, and whenever the night was good I used to work the lamps for some hours after dinner and often with great success. I remember that one night in July when Mandelli was dining with me and it was raining steadily, though not very heavily, we could hardly get through dinner on account of the number of moths that came in. When, armed with large killing bottles, we went into the verandah, we found the walls covered with such numbers that it was not easy to select the rare from the common varieties of which I already had enough. As fast as my bottle was filled, I sat down to pin the moths, whilst Mandelli in turn filled his. A net was not often wanted, as the majority of the moths sat quietly on the white¬ washed wall within reach. The majority were small, but some large Bombyces would hardly go into the bottle, and the variety was so great that on this particular night we caught, between half-past eight and mid¬ night, something like 2,000 moths belonging to about 125 species. This is, so far as I know, a record for this kind of work in the Old World,
