courts of justice [for the benefit of their brothers who can talk and
write]. He levies the rent of their fields, he fixes the tariff, and
he nominates to every appointment, from that of road-sweeper or
constable, to the great blood-sucking officers round the Court and
Treasury. As for Boards of Revenue and Lieutenant-Governors who
occasionally come sweeping across the country, with their locust hosts
of servants and petty officials, they are but an occasional nightmare;
while the Governor-General is a mere shadow in the background of
thought, half blended with "John Company Bahadur" and other myths of
the dawn.

The Collector lives in a long rambling bungalow furnished with folding
chairs and tables, and in every way marked by the provisional
arrangements of camp life. He seems to have just arrived from out of
the firmament of green fields and mango groves that encircles the
little station where he lives; or he seems just about to pass away
into it again. The shooting-howdahs are lying in the verandah, the
elephant of a neighbouring landowner is swinging his hind foot to and
fro under a tree, or switching up straw and leaves on to his back, a
dozen camels are lying down in a circle making bubbling noises, and
tents are pitched here and there to dry, like so many white wings on
which the whole establishment is about to rise and fly away--fly away
into "the district," which is the correct expression for the vast
expanse of level plain melting into blue sky on the wide
horizon-circle around.

The Collector is a bustling man. He is always in a hurry. His
multitudinous duties succeed one another so fast that one is never
ended before the next begins. A mysterious thing called "the Joint"
comes gleaning after him, I believe, and completes the inchoate work.