A Handley-Page then seemed a grotesque giant. There had been no intermediate steps between small machines and this Colossus, which rumour had it could carry twenty-two men. It was as though a fiftystorey sky-scraper, as large as the Woolworth Building in New York, had suddenly been erected in London.

I had seen, at my training aerodrome, the first of these great machines looming in its hangar. I had clambered over it with astonishment. I had been one of a large crowd which had stood on the aerodrome, and had wondered, as the great structure moved clumsily across the grass, if it really would mount in the air. I had seen it rise and roar round the aerodrome with its deep, double throbbing note, and had gone away full of excitement, proud to have been there.

Little did I imagine that I was to be on the very first which flew to France, and that I was to be on the pioneer

So when I received my orders, I packed my bags a little bemusedly, and with a sad heart left the little harbour, the rows of seaplane sheds, the mess, and my friends -taking away many a memory of quiet days in the marshes, and of almost ecstatic dawn patrols over the grey and silver levels of the North Sea.

I was going on to unknown destinies and unknown destinations. I knew the familiar sensation every man in the service going to a new place must feel so often-of leaving a certain existence, and going on towards an uncertain one.

Although I did not know it, I was going to a year and a half of adventure, of travel, of war and excitement-I was going to & romantic and strangely-appealing life, full of successes and disappointments, full of dreams and realities. The gods had smiled on me, and were leading me to the fantastic and fascinating work which I would have chosen above all others in the world-Night Bombing.

THE retired and pensioned Gurkha soldier outside in the verandah has orderly duties that require his presence at our office between the hours of six and eight each evening.

He is short but stockily built, wears two war medals and a bahadri, lacks one eye, and limps as a result of a wound received in action. He lost his eye out of action while worshipping indiscreetly at the shrine of Venus; and after he has looked upon the wine when it is sufficiently red he will sometimes tell you the story. Rifleman Rama Gurung-for that is the old scoundrel's name -looks upon the wine when it is red almost nightly. He arrives at our office strictly sober, and generally leaves it as strictly drunk. When sober he is unbending punctiliousness itself, when drunk embarrassingly expansive, and there are intermediate stages when he merely sits and grins in a passionless Nirvana of his own. It is the problem of our life to discover how and where he effects this monotonously regular transition from grave to garrulous; for although he is always within a few yards of us while we work, we have never yet actually detected him in the act of raising the flowing bowl to his lips. Nevertheless, although neither olink of bottle nor gleam of glass ever disturbs our tedious

VOL. CCIV.-NO. MCCXXXVIII.

labours or betrays his stealthy activities, he achieves the mysterious nightly, and, aided by the subtle alchemist, transmutes life's leaden metal into gold with a facility which we cannot help but feel when distracted by cipher telegrams, the eccentricities of local headhunters, silkworm statistics, or Bengali politios-is secretly to be envied.

But for old Rama's nightly vagaries our evenings would be uneventful. The brief Himalayan sunset flares fierily for fifteen short minutes over the distant rosy - dimpled snows, and then darkness falls, swiftly blotting out the dazzling scene, like a black velvet curtain rung down abruptly upon some limelit but deserted stage. A scared little breeze now rises, and rushes wildly hither and thither among the gloomy and contemptuous pines, while the frogs begin their pious croaking vespers upon the silver lip of the star-stabbed lake beneath us. Arutting stag

the very incarnation of primitive passion-calls hoarsely to his reluctant mate across two miles of empty valley, and the pagan beauty of the hot, dark, lonely night steals through our open windows. Every ghost of memory now takes courage in the shadows, and comes knocking importunately upon a door that ever stands ajar. Gay ghosts, sad ghosts, and 3 E

little

whimsical, ohild-like ghosts of nothing in partioular... all the phantom procession of a tired brain when silence, solitude, and space combine to distract its attention from material and mundane things. However, this is no moment for idle dreaming, because to-night we are "for it," and in our official capacity must visit a neighbouring hamlet in order to bless with our important English presence a local Hindu festival that we call the Dewali. This festival is sacred to the bloody goddess Kali, and it is a lucky night for all bankers and merchants, who seize the occasion to give freely to charity. For this reason the evening is a propitious one for the British official to attempt to extract silver for the Red Cross Society from the buried hoard of the normally miserly bania. . The British official-vide the Amrita Bazar Patrika-is ever detestably Machiavellian

us now that belief would be swiftly exploded. Our main street is packed as densely as Piccadilly on a Jubilee night, and, as in the Piccadilly of old days, our cheerful, merry crowds go laughing up and down it.

some remote

Here is a group of country mice in from jungle, pater- and materfamilias and half a dozen wideeyed staring children.

There is a bevy of laughing nut-brown light o' loves descending from a tikha gharri, gaily dressed it is true, but bafflingly respectable - looking to the European, who can only think of vice with a capital V. Round the corner some jolly little swaggering Gurkhas -bare-kneed, bullet-headed, and bantam-like-are buying Scissors, oigarettes, and ogling the girls for all the world like Mr Atkins in the Edgware Road; our olean, smiling, fivefoot-four Mongolian defenders are every inch dapper, soldierly, and dandified little Pagans, from their jauntily cocked slouch hats to their shiny clicking boot heels

Dang, dang, dang, dang!our thin copper temple bells have neither the sombre timbre nor yet the infinite variety of your sweet Western cathedral chimes-the priests are calling us to prayer. Tang, tang, tang, tang! ... wh'roosh, wh'rorl, wh'room! . . . and the conches take up their bellowing choruses, while we all laugh merrily at their acoustic surprises. It takes, you see, but little to amuse us to-night, because we are in such a good temper. A

sacred and flower - garlanded bull treads heavily on our toes, but we only offer him perfumed sweetmeats; and even the savage ohattering monkeys in the trees are not forgotten in our catholic scheme of hospitality.

Cholera may be rife, crops may fail, or savage beasts lurk for us on our way home from our jollification, but we are a happy little people to-night in this corner of the foothills-for haven't the priests just told us that our wives will bear us men-children before next harvest, and hasn't that vagabond astrologer drawn us a horoscope which unluckier kings might envy? Let us beat the tom-tom, watch the nautch, quaff the oup, and intimidate the bania! There are bonbouches of vegetable ourry folded between cool green leaves to be tasted, betel-nut in lacquer trays to be chewed, and a hundred other queer delicacies that come our way but seldom in our bee-like, little, laborious lives.

aid of the Red Cross. A most superior Indian conjurer this, who is depicted upon a placard as wearing American evening olothes, while his nom-de-théâtre is "Mr Funnyman of Calcutta." He is performing at the "Assamese Theatre," and thither, amid a cosmopolitan throng, we wend our way in our slowly driven motor. Slowly driven because no Indian crowd ever takes the slightest notice of a motorhorn; and indeed, were not our progress heralded by three blaspheming Moslem policemen, we doubt if we should ever reach our destination at all.

The "Assamese Theatre" is a thing of beauty and a joy for ever. The scene painted on the drop-ourtain is très anglais, and depicts what the Manager faithfully believes to be a typical stately home of England. In the immediate foreground are seen the lodge gates that lead to the ancestral demesne within. The pillars supporting the entrance to this rural retreat are apparently wrought of blue marble and red porphyry, tastefully decorated as regards the detail with silver-gilt and mother-o'-pearl. In the background, what might be described as a mansion in the Heavenly Jerusalem style of architecture rears its golden turrets from amid a grove of what are very obviously toddypalms, and a union-jack floats patriotically from an open window, out of which a lady in a pink-satin ball dress gazes haughtily at a football match.

An elephant is seemingly