constituted their dinner, and most excellent they were.

I really must pay a tribute to the graceful and delightful Maharanee,
who presided with such dignity and charm at these gatherings. I had
first met the Maharanee in London, in 1887, at the festivities in
connection with Queen Victoria's Jubilee. The Maharanee, the daughter
of a very ancient Bengal family, was then quite young. She had only
emerged "from behind the curtain," as natives of India say, for six
months. In other words, she had just emancipated herself from the
seclusion of the Zenana, where she had lived since her marriage. She
had then very delicate features, and most lovely eyes, with
exquisitely moulded hands and arms. Very wisely she had not adopted
European fashions in their entirety, but had retained the becoming
_saree_ of gold or silver tissue or brocade, throwing the end of
it over her head as a veil, and looking perfectly charming in it.
Everything in England must have seemed strange to her, the climate,
the habits, and the mode of living, and yet this little Princess
behaved as though she had been used to it all her life, and still
managed to retain the innate dignity of the high-caste native lady.

As one travels through life certain pictures remain vividly clear-cut
in the memory. The evenings in that shooting-camp are amongst these. I
can still imagine myself strolling with an extremely comely lady along
the stretches of natural lawn that crowned the bluff above the river,
the gurgle and splashing of the stream loud in our ears as we looked
over the unending expanse of jungle below us, vast and full of mystery
under the brilliant moonlight of India. In India the moonlight is
golden, not silvery as with us. The great grey sea of scrub, with an
occasional prominent tree catching this golden light on its clear-cut
outline, had something awe-inspiring about it, for here one was face