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Now Jeypore from the Anglo-Indian point of view is a station on the Rajputana-Malwa line, on the way to Bombay, where half an hour is allowed for dinner, and where there ought to be more protection from the sun than at present exists. Some few, more learned than the rest, know that garnets come from Jeypore, and here the limits of our wisdom are set. We do not, to quote the Calcutta shopkeeper, come out “for the good of our ’ealth,” and what touring we accomplish is for the most part off the line of rail.

For these reasons, and because he wished to study our winter birds of passage, one of the few thousand Englishmen in India, on a date and in a place which have no concern with the story, sacrificed all his self-respect and became—at enormous personal inconvenience—a Globe-Trotter going to Jeypore, and leaving behind him for a little while all that old and well-known life in which Commissioners and Deputy Commissioners, Governors and Lieutenant-Governors, Aides-de-Camp, Colonels and their wives, Majors, Captains and Subalterns after their kind move and rule and govern and squabble and fight and sell each other’s horses, and tell wicked stories of their neighbours. But before he had fully settled into his part or accustomed himself to saying “Please take out this luggage” to the coolies at the stations, he saw from the train the Taj wrapped in the mists of the morning.