on for ten at night; but we sit with windows all wide open, the
punkah going, the thinnest conceivable garments, and yet we sweat,
my brother, very profusely.... To-morrow I shall be up at
gun-fire, about half-past four A.M. and drive down to the civil
station, about three miles off, to see a friend, an officer of our
own corps ... who is sick, return, take my Bearer's daily account,
write a letter or so, and lie down with _Don Quixote_ under a
punkah, go to sleep the first chapter that Sancho lets me, and
sleep till ten, get up, bathe, re-dress and breakfast; do my daily
business, such as it is--hard work, believe me, in a hot sleep-
inducing, intestine-withering climate, till sunset, when doors and
windows are thrown open ... and mortals go out to "eat the air," as
the natives say.

The climate, indeed, had already begun its deadly attack upon an
organism as fine and sensitive as any of the myriad victims which the
secret forces of India's sun and soil have exacted from her European
invaders. In 1853, William Delafield Arnold came home invalided, with
his wife and his elder two children. The third, Oakeley (the future War
Minister in Mr. Balfour's Government), was born in England in 1855.
There were projects of giving up India and settling at home. The young
soldier whose literary gift, always conspicuous among the nine in the
old childish Fox How days, and already shown in _Oakfield_, was becoming
more and more marked, was at this time a frequent contributor to the
_Times_, the _Economist_, and _Fraser_, and was presently offered the
editorship of the _Economist_. But just as he was about to accept it,
came a flattering offer from India, no doubt through the influence of
Sir John Lawrence, of the Directorship of Public Instruction in the
Punjaub. He thought himself bound to accept it, and with his wife and
two children went out again at the end of 1855. His business was to