A DURBAR, 



want it or not ; and from any point of view it is strange 

 that Europeans in India know so little, see so little, care so 

 little about all the intense life that surrounds them. The 

 boy who was the most ardent of bug-hunters, or the most 

 enthusiastic of bird-nesters, in England, where one shilling 

 will buy nearly all that is known, or can be known, about 

 birds or butterflies, maintains in this country, aided by 

 Messrs. B. and S., an unequal strife with the insupportable- 

 ness of an ^##/'-smitten life. Why, if he would stir up for 

 one day the embers of the old flame, he could not quench 

 it again with such a prairie of fuel around him. I am not 

 speaking of Bombay people, with their clubs and gym- 

 khanas and other devices for oiling the wheels of existence, 

 but of the dreary up-country exile, whose life is a blank, a 

 moral Sahara, a catechism of the Nihilist creed. What 

 such a one needs is a hobby. Every hobby is good, a sign 

 of good and an influence for good. Any hobby will draw 

 out the mind ; but the one I plead for touches the soul too, 

 keeps the milk of human kindness from souring, puts a 

 gentle poetry into the prosiest life. That all my own finer 

 feelings have not long since withered up in this land of 

 separation from " the old familiar faces," I attribute partly 

 to a pair of rabbits. All rabbits are idiotic things, but these 



