expectantly any longer. While I was under age they trustfully gave me
credit; it is sad to disappoint them now that I am on the verge of thirty.
But what am I to do? Words of wisdom will not come! I am utterly
incompetent to provide things that may profit the multitude. Beyond a
snatch of song, some tittle-tattle, a little merry fooling, I have been
unable to advance. And as the result, those who held high hopes will turn
their wrath on me; but did any one ever beg them to nurse these
expectations?

Such are the thoughts which assail me since one fine _Bysakh_ morning
I awoke amidst fresh breeze and light, new leaf and flower, to find that I
had stepped into my twenty-seventh year.




SHELIDAH, 1888.


Our house-boat is moored to a sandbank on the farther side of the river. A
vast expanse of sand stretches away out of sight on every side, with here
and there a streak, as of water, running across, though sometimes what
gleams like water is only sand.

Not a village, not a human being, not a tree, not a blade of grass--the
only breaks in the monotonous whiteness are gaping cracks which in places
show the layer of moist, black clay underneath.

Looking towards the East, there is endless blue above, endless white
beneath. Sky empty, earth empty too--the emptiness below hard and barren,