May, July, and September. That sounds a queer mixture, but to the unaccustomed eye the jungle confusion is just as curious. In England the spring takes months to its shy courting, but here it is marriage by capture-a sudden forcible shaking down of the old green leaves and an outburst of new ones almost on the morrow.

A week ago you might have taken the great silver-stemmed Indian fig for an evergreen, since scarcely one of its dense green leaves had fallen or faded in all the long avenues. Then, one morning, one heard a sound on the tent, a little different from the scampering feet of squirrels, and before night the heavy stiffening leaves were strewn all about it, and in two days the silvery outstretched arms were bare. But ere then one had seen young fig trees in the jungle, which had put forth their tender shoots, through which the sunlight filtered red as through a rabbit's ears. So sudden here are the ways of spring.

But there is often something prettier in its swiftness, for in many of the trees of which no one seems to know the names, the fall of the leaves is followed by an outburst of flowers before leaves come again. There are tall trees, like Spanish oaks, with waxen rose-red flowers all over their bare pearl-gray branches, and flushed pools of fallen petals about their roots. Some are covered with crowns of flame-coloured

tulip-shaped cups; some with bright orange spires, which match the lantana which blossoms beneath them; and from others hang citron tassels or long trumpet-shaped bells.

But the rich heavy scents of the spring do not come from the gay flowers but from the pale ones. From the mango most of all, because mangoes are so many, and this year their slender leaves are almost hidden under a cloak of greenish yellow plumes, from which is shaken the thick sweet scent, like a mixture of meadowsweet and mountain ash, rather drowsy at midday but delightful in the cool morning as one gallops under the laden trees. But away from the mango's dense shadows are more delicate flavours. There are odours of jasmine, azalea, and heliotrope from trees with flowers in fleecy white clusters, drooping creamy racemes, and feather-like cymes; while, more arresting than them all, where the jungle is thinner, their ivory censers scatter incense over the magnolia's bare boughs.

CHAPTER XXI

NORTHWARDS ONCE MORE

Mean

FROM Mysore we started upon our last great zigzag across India, which is to cover some four thousand five hundred miles in taking us to the port of departure, which is but a quarter of that distance to the north of us. Once more we shall pass, though in an opposite direction, through the United Provinces and the Punjab, across which two months ago the dusty train took us. while we are leaving the south, the wonderful South of India, without having seen the least fragment of its treasures, without having had so much as a glimpse of those marvellous temples which are its especial glory, and which go so far, if not to make intelligible, at least magnificently to illuminate that all-embracing theism of the Hindu, "humorous, amorous, obscene, subtle, and refined." The answer, doubtless, is that we went to Mysore and have come to Haidarabad for sport, and not to make to make acquaintance with the mind of India; but even so adequate a reason cannot eliminate one's regrets. For here in the south we were away from all the "show" places and off the main tracks of the trotter. We were

in touch with the real thing, with the great fanes which are still a part of the life of the people, as none of the beautifully preserved antiquities we have visited can quite be said to be.

Sport at Mysore hardly fulfilled expectations, but it provided one amusing incident which was distantly related to the khedda drive. Coming back to Mysore one evening along the road which led out to the scene of the drive, when the warm odour of the mangroves was dying out in the night dew and the white trees, amid whose balsam-scented azalea-like blossoms the sunbirds, like jewelled shuttles, had flitted all day, were a mere ghostly dimness, the acetylene glare in front of the motor became thick with dust, and the driver threw out his clutch and listened for the throb of the engine which he imagined must be in front of him. Not a sound came, however, to suggest another car on the road, and, suspecting dust-devils, he ran on again into the murk of it. The dust grew denser, and, just as the lamps were becoming useless, between their thick milky cones of light appeared a huge dark lurching mass, which a jerk of the lamps showed to be the hinder parts of an elephant. Surprise and habit tightened the driver's fingers on his horn, and, as the hooter blared behind him, the elephant, instead of turning to trample on the car, as the driver, alarmed at his unpremeditated rashness, expected, flung back over his shoulder

a terrified bellow, and undulating monstrously from side to side, plunged forward at an undignified gallop, his great haunches quivering and his big pads meeting the road like the beats of a piston. Whether he took the hoot of the syren for the hoarse voice of some infuriated female of his species whom he was anxious to avoid, or for that of some new and dreadful beast with eyes of fire and a throat of brass, he was so flurried that, in his desire to escape it, he took the only course which could keep him in its path, and for three miles went straight along the road at a speed that would have shocked a Surrey magistrate, filling the dust churned up behind him with outraged howlings, with the motor hard upon his heels. Amusing as the experience was, there is something incongruous in motoring through an Indian jungle in search of game, and one suspects that the failure of so promising a district to provide the Prince with sport may have been due to the noise and the taint of the number of motors that not only took the Royal party to the khedda but continued to run daily between it and Mysore. Were that the cause

one would regret it less than any other, since all such luxurious facilities, especially where the quarry is worth adventure, have a tendency to rob the title of sportsman of all its old honourable implication of hardihood.

From the blank covers of Mysore we went