INTRODUCTION xvii 



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 gymkhanas 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 in this land of separa- 

 tion from ' old familiar faces,' I attribute partly 

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

 but these come in and sit up meekly and beg a crust 

 of bread, and even a perennial fare of village moor gee 

 cannot induce me to issue the order for their 

 execution and conversion into pie. But if such 

 considerations cannot lead, the struggle for existence 

 should drive a man in this country to learn the 

 ways of his border tribes. For no one, I take it, 

 who reflects for an instant will deny that a small 

 mosquito, with black rings upon a white ground, 

 or a sparrow that has finally made up its mind to 

 rear a family in your ceiling, exercises an influence 

 on your personal happiness far beyond the Czar of 

 the Russias. It is not a question of scientific 

 frontiers — the enemy invades us on all sides. We 

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