Requiems, but I saw no resurrection in its eye, so I passed on.

[I have just procured an adult specimen of the Bengali Baboo (it was
originally the editor of the _Calcutta Moonshine_), and I have engaged
an embryologist, on board wages, to examine and report upon it.

I once found George Bassoon weeping profusely over a dish of
artichokes. I was a little surprised, for there was a bottle close at
hand and he had a book in his hand. I took the book. It was not
Boccaccio; it was not Rabelais; it was not even Swinburne. I felt that
something must be wrong. I turned to the title-page. I found it was a
poem printed for private circulation by the _Government of India_. It
was called "The Anthropomorphous Baboo subtilised into Man."]

When I was at Lhassa the Dalai Lama told me that a virtuous
cow-hippopotamus by metempsychosis might, under unfavourable
circumstances, become an undergraduate of the Calcutta University, and
that, when patent-leather shoes and English supervened, the thing was
a Baboo. [This sounds very plausible; but how about the prehensile
tail which the Education Department finds so much in the way of
improvement, which indeed is said to preclude all access to the
Bengali mind, and which can grasp everything but an idea, even an
inquisitorial schoolmaster? "Hereby hangs a tail" is a motto in which
Edward Gibbon had no monopoly.]

I forget whether it was the Duke of Buckingham, or Mr. Lethbridge, or
General Scindia--I always mix up these C.I.E.'s together in my mind
somehow--who told me that a Bengali Baboo had never been known to
laugh, but only to giggle with clicking noises like a crocodile. Now
this is very telling evidence, because if a Baboo does not laugh at a