hands. They go naked to the waist, and bareheaded, shaving the front part of the skull, but wearing their hair long behind. Nearly all the townsmen are painted with white dabs and streaks, but the Brahmins have a coloured stripe down the forehead, with a stripe of white on either side. Some of the young Brahmins are very handsome, and in their clean white clothes, with books under their arms, are in striking contrast with the peasantry.

“At Tanjore we saw yet another temple, with its colossal bull under a stone canopy. It is said to be a monolith, but is painted to imitate bronze. What interested us most was a series of portraits of Siwaji and his descendants, once rulers of the country, in a little shrine, the whole enclosure surrounded by a deep moat, and fortified, but without worshippers, and all deserted. The palace near it is still occupied by Siwaji’s descendants, dispossessed and pensioned. They are only women now who live on in this rambling place, shut up, sad remains of state greatly out at elbows. The rooms are fine. In the library they showed us some interesting Indian paintings of the last century, and an illustrated book of Chinese tortures, which we may imagine the last Rajah consoling himself with after his loss of power. It was a festival day, and we saw the pomp and glory of the little court turned out, two elephants and two camels, a dozen poor led horses, one mounted officer and twenty soldiers, aged retainers most of these, put into cast-off English uniforms.” The dispossessed Princes of India always reminded me of captive wild beasts shut up in cages, lame and diseased, and dying of their lack of moral exercise.

The last two days of our journey to Madras we were without any native communication, as we had got beyond our recommendations from Ceylon, and on the other hand had come in contact as yet with no Europeans. My journal deals principally with the natural features of the country, which had become now flat and monotonous, with crops of rice, mostly under irrigation. I find a list of birds seen from the train: egret, pied bittern, little bittern, snipe, pied kingfisher, whiteheaded kite, kite, hoopoe, a variety of roller, bee-bird, lark, parrot, hen-harrier, shrike, long-tailed blackbird, myna, partridge, a variety of pheasant, dove, crow, sandpiper, small cormorant, kestrel, sea-gull, magpie, robin, besides many small birds I did not see near enough to identify. I also saw tracks of wild boars in one place. At Chingleput hills began, and a pretty country with large lakes and tracts of jungle, the formation granite with red earth and boulders.

“17th Nov.—Madras. A horrible place. We are at Lippert’s Hotel, facing the sea, with a broad esplanade in front, down which the red dust drives. We wrote our names down at Government House. They took us at first by mistake to the Government Office in the Fort, where I was invited to sign my name in a book as ‘an officer returning from furlough, and demanding an extension of leave.’ Government House, when we got there, was a white pillared edifice standing in a dreary park. There was a sentry at the door, but no other living soul, not even a footman out of livery, or a charwoman, to tell us that ‘the family was out of town,’ but the doors were open and a book was there. Mr. and Mrs. Grant Duff are at Guindi, another residence seven miles off.”

We stayed a week in Madras, which was longer than I had intended, but as soon as it became known that I had arrived I began to receive visits from the more prominent natives, Hindus as well as Mohammedans, which interested me.

My first visitors at Madras were a couple of Hindu gentlemen, editors of the local newspaper, the “Hindu”; their names, Subramania Ayer and Vira Raghava Chaya; intelligent, clear-headed men, contrasting by no means unfavourably with men of their profession in London. Their manners were good, and their conversation brilliant. The matters principally discussed between us were the heavy pressure of the Land Revenue on the Madras peasantry, the burden of the salt tax, the abuses connected with the Civil courts, the ruin of the cotton manufacture and industry by the enforced free trade with England, the unreality of the so-called “productive work,” especially as to roads, and the conservative opposition of the covenanted Civil Service to all reform—neither viceroys nor governors were able to oppose them. I asked what was thought of Lord Ripon by the mass of the people. “He is the first Viceroy,” my visitor said, “who has been known to them by name in this Presidency. Hitherto the people have only known the local collector, but Lord Ripon’s name is known. Indeed he is looked upon by the ignorant, especially since the recent agitation on the Ilbert Bill, as a new incarnation of God.” “And Mr. Grant Duff?” I asked. “We consider him,” he said, “a failure. He came out as Governor of Madras with great expectations, and we find him feeble, sickly, unable to do his work himself, and wholly in the hands of the permanent officials. The Duke of Buckingham, of whom we expected less, did much more, and much better.”

I found this opinion of Grant Duff a very general one among the natives. Though a clever man, he had spent all his life in the confined atmosphere of the House of Commons, and was quite unable to deal with a state of society so strange to him as that which he found in India. I was constantly asked by them what line they should take, and what hope there was for them of any kind of self government or real reform. And I explained to them frankly what the position of parties was in England, that the Radicals, of whom Lord Ripon was in some degree one, would be glad enough to see India governed for the Indians; that the Tories made no pretence of governing India except in English interests, and by the sword; and that between them stood the Whigs, who talked about progress, but always left things standing as they were. My advice was that they should press their grievances now while Lord Ripon was in power, as there was some chance of their being listened to, avoiding only anything like disorder, which would be a pretext with the Home Government, which was purely Whig, to stop such few reforms as Lord Ripon had begun. I encouraged them, however, to continue the agitation for representative Government in the Councils, and thought they might get it in twenty or twenty-five years time. Their general answer was, they would be satisfied if they got it in a hundred years.

These first visitors sent others to me, and a clever young Brahmin, Varada Rao, constituted himself my cicerone with those who were afraid to come to me openly. The most interesting of those he took me to visit, though it was not timidity but advanced age which had prevented him calling, was the old Mahratta Brahmin, Ragunath Rao, some time minister of Holkar and brother of the still better known Madhava Rao, a man of the highest distinction, much wit, and the widest possible intelligence. Indeed, his conversation might have been that of a Socrates, whom in person he much resembled, being a little rugged man whom I found very simply clad in a shirt, a blue head-dress, and with no shoes or stockings to his feet, but who at his first word impressed me with a sense of his integrity and his vast intellectual superiority. On the high politics of India his discourse was most instructive, and, like Socrates, he had the habit of illustrating each point of his discourse with a story always good and often extremely amusing. He dwelt especially on the difference there was between the old-fashioned personal rule of the Indian Princes, with whom there was always the possibility of a personal appeal to the head of the State, and the blank seclusion of the English rulers, who were walled off from all knowledge of what was