virtue in furnished apartments. But over all there hovered that sense of
well-scrubbed cleanliness which comes from the touch of a native military
servant. An indulgence in this habit of rubbing and scrubbing was indeed
accountable for much dilapidation; for that silent little Ghoorka man,
Ben Abdi, had rubbed and scrubbed many things not intended by an
ingenious camp-furnisher for such treatment. James Edward Makerstone Agar
was engaged in the compilation of a diary, which volume there is reason
to believe is still preserved in a woman's jewel drawer.

It has not run through any editions--indeed, no compositor's finger has
up to this time defiled its pages. This, in fact, was one of those
literary works, ground slowly out from the millstones of the brain, of
which the style fails to please the taste of the present day. To catch
the fancy of a slang-loving and thoughtless generation the writer must
throw off his works. This is an age of "throwing off," and it is to be
presumed that future ages will throw the result away. One must be
brilliant, shallow, slightly unpleasant and very unwholesome, to acquire
nowadays that best of all literary reputations which leaveth a balance at
one's bank.

J.E.M. Agar--or "Jem" as his friends call him to his face and his
servants behind his back--Jem Sahib to wit--was no Pepys. His literary
style was disjointed, heavy, and occasionally illiterate. This last
peculiarity, by the way, is of no consequence nowadays, but it is
mentioned here for ulterior motives. In the pages of this little
black-bound volume there were no scintillating thoughts scribbled there
with suspicious neatness of diction, such as one finds in the diaries of
great men who, it would seem, are not above post-mortem vanity. The diary
was a chronicle of solid facts--Jem being essentially solid and a man of
the very plainest facts.