taken--these form the fair guerdon that stirs my breast at certain
moments and makes me often resolve, after dinner, "to scorn delights
and live laborious days," and sell my beautiful soul, illuminated with
art and poetry, to the devil of Industry, with reversion to Sir John
Strachey.

How mysterious and delicious are the cool penetralia of the Viceregal
Office! It is the censorium of the Empire; it is the seat of thought;
it is the abode of moral responsibility! What battles, what famines,
what excursions of pleasure, what banquets and pageants, what concepts
of change have sprung into life here! Every pigeon-hole contains a
potential revolution; every office-box cradles the embryo of a war or
dearth. What shocks and vibrations, what deadly thrills does this
little thunder-cloud office transmit to far-away provinces lying
beyond rising and setting suns! Ah! Vanity, these are pleasant
lodgings for five years, let who may turn the kaleidoscope after us.

A little errant knight of the press who has just arrived on the
Delectable Mountains, comes rushing in, looks over my shoulder, and
says, "A deuced expensive thing a Viceroy." This little errant knight
would take the thunder at a quarter of the price, and keep the Empire
paralytic with change and fear of change as if the great
Thirty-thousand-pounder himself were on Olympus.--ALI BABA.




No. II