VISITING THE GARDENS 179 



is about to pounce upon him. A restless horse 

 seems to be trampling like a must elephant 

 And perhaps over all comes the roar of the 

 tiger, nothing indeed to be afraid of, as he would 

 go silent enough if attending to his bad business. 

 Such are the torments of a sweltering Indian 

 night, that give an Englishman cause to thank 

 the goodness and the grace that made his birth- 

 place in a land where a caterwauling puss or a 

 scratching mouse would be the worst of nocturnal 

 bugbears." 



We Britons, lulled to sleep by the tramp of 

 the policeman and the watch-dog's honest bark, 

 have some reason for calling "sour grapes" to 

 the products of those giant greenhouse regions, 

 East and South, where Nature appears to ex- 

 haust herself in labyrinths of swelling beauty and 

 grandeur. But if the tropical trees had tongues, 

 they might tell us that we do not judge them 

 fairly in this cramped setting, fettered beneath 

 roofs of glass, condemned to unnatural silence 

 and restraint; imprisoned along with strange 

 companions ; stinted from full meals of equatorial 

 storm to the trickling of a rubber hose that can 

 no longer clasp their trunks in creeping embraces ; 

 robbed of the sunshine that floods their native 



