He is clever, I am told, and being clever he has to be rather morose
in manner and careless in dress, or people might forget that he was
clever. He has always been clever. He was the clever man of his year.
He was so clever when he first came out that he could never learn to
ride, or speak the language, and had to be translated to the
Provincial Secretariat. But though he could never speak an
intelligible sentence in the language, he had such a practical and
useful knowledge of it, in half-a-dozen of its dialects, that he could
pass examinations in it with the highest credit, netting immense
rewards. He thus became not only more and more clever, but more and
more solvent; until he was an object of wonder to his contemporaries,
of admiration to the Lieutenant-Governor, and of desire to several
_Burra Mem Sahibs_[A] with daughters. It was about this time that he
is supposed to have written an article published in some English
periodical. It was said to be an article of a solemn description, and
report magnified the periodical into the _Quarterly Review_. So he
became one who wrote for the English Press. It was felt that he was a
man of letters; it was assumed that he was on terms of familiar
correspondence with all the chief literary men of the day. With so
conspicuous a reputation, he believed it necessary to do something in
religion. So he gave up religion, and allowed it to be understood that
he was a man of advanced views: a Positivist, a Buddhist, or something
equally occult. Thus he became ripe for the highest employment, and
was placed successively on a number of Special Commissions. He
inquired into everything; he wrote hundredweights of reports; he
proved himself to have the true paralytic ink flux, precisely the kind
of wordy discharge or brain hæmorrhage required of a high official in
India. He would write ten pages where a clod-hopping collector would
write a sentence. He could say the same thing over and over again in a
hundred different ways. The feeble forms of official satire were at