CHAPTER I

An ideal form of travel for the elderly--A claim to roam at will in
print--An invitation to a big-game shoot--Details of journey to Cooch
Behar--The commercial magnate and the station-master--An outbreak of
cholera--Arrival at Cooch Behar Palace--Our Australian Jehu--The
Shooting Camp--Its gigantic scale--The daily routine--"Chota Begum,"
my confidential elephant--Her well-meant attentions--My first
tiger--Another lucky shot--The leopard and the orchestra--The
Maharanee of Cooch Behar--An evening in the jungle--The buns and the
bear--Jungle pictures--A charging rhinoceros--Another rhinoceros
incident--The amateur mahouts--Circumstances preventing a second visit
to Cooch Behar.


The drawbacks of advancing years are so painfully obvious to those who
have to shoulder the burden of a long tale of summers, that there is
no need to enlarge upon them.

The elderly have one compensation, however; they have well-filled
store-houses of reminiscences, chests of memories which are the
resting-place of so many recollections that their owner can at will
re-travel in one second as much of the surface of this globe as it has
been his good fortune to visit, and this, too, under the most
comfortable conditions imaginable.

Not for him the rattle of the wheels of the train as they grind the
interminable miles away; not for him the insistent thump of the
engines as they relentlessly drive the great liner through angry