Twenty-one Days in India. George Robert Aberigh-Mackay

which belong exclusively to the official humour of Simla. I have said that the Secretary is clever, scornful, jocose, imperfectly sinful, and nimble with his pen. I shall only add that he has succeeded in catching the tone of the Imperial Bumbledom.

      This tone is an affectation of æsthetic and literary sympathies, combined with a cynical disdain of everything Indian and Anglo-Indian. The flotsam and jetsam of advanced European thought are eagerly sought and treasured up. "The New Republic" is on every drawing-room table. One must speak of nothing but the latest doings at the Gaiety, the pictures of the last Academy, the ripest outcome of scepticism in the Nineteenth Century, or the aftermath in the Fortnightly. If I were to talk to our Secretariat man about the harvest prospects of the Deckan, the beauty of the Himalayan scenery, or the book I have just published in Calcutta about the Rent ​Law, he would stare at me with feigned surprise and horror.

      "When he thinks of his own native land

      In a moment he seems to be there

       But, alas! Ali Baba at hand

      Soon hurries him back to despair.