One heave and a
wriggle means a boa-constrictor, two heaves and a growl a tiger--and
so on. So you can imagine me in a tent, in the dead of night, sitting
up, anxiously striking matches and consulting my table as to what is
attacking me.
Mrs. Ormonde, who is so nervous that if a cracker goes off in her
hearing she thinks it is another Mutiny, is anxious that we should
take guns with us into the Mofussil in case we are attacked. Picture
to yourself Boggley and me setting out "with a little hoard of
Maxims." Armed, I should be a menace alike to friend and foe!
My first stopping-place is Takai. Boggley is going to some very
far-away place where it wouldn't be convenient to take a female, so
when Dr. and Mrs. Russel asked me to come to them while he is there
I very gladly accepted the invitation. Dr. Russel is a medical
missionary. I don't know him, but his wife, a very clever, interesting
woman, I met when she was last home, and she told me about her home in
the jungle until I longed to see it. Boggley will come for me in about
ten days. Bella I shall leave in Calcutta. It would be a nuisance
carting her about from place to place, and I am not so helpless that I
can't manage for myself.
Expect next mail to receive a budget of prodigious size.
THE SUNBURNED EARTH
_Takai, Jan. 19_.
There is no doubt this is the ideal place for letter-writing. I sit
here, in the verandah, with long, quiet hours stretching out before me
and nothing to do but write and write, and I suppose that is why for
the last thirty minutes I have sat nibbling the end of my pen and
dreaming--without putting pen to paper.
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