The hut just above ours was tenanted by a party of three young Lancers on leave from Rawal Pindi, a gramophone, and a few dogs.

One of the soldiers was laid up with a bad ankle, and it soon became a daily custom for Jane or me to play a game of chess or piquet with the invalid.

Later on, when leave had expired for the hale, when the dogs had departed, and the voice of the gramophone was no more heard in the land, we came to see a great deal of the wounded warrior, and finally arranged to personally conduct him off the premises, and return him, in time for medical survey, to Rawal Pindi.

Many years ago I read a delightful poem called The Paradise of Birds—­I believe it was by Mortimer Collins,[1] but I am not sure.  Now the Poet (who, together with Windbag, sailed to this very paradise of birds) deemed that this happy asylum of the feathered fowls was somewhere at the back of the North Pole.  He cannot have known of Kashmir, or he would assuredly have sent the persecuted birds thither, and placed the “Roc’s Egg” as janitor, somewhere by the portals of the Jhelum Valley.  Kashmir is truly and indeed the paradise of birds, for there no man molests them, and no schoolboy collects eggs, and the result is a fascinating fearlessness, the result of perpetual peace and plenty.

I regret exceedingly that my ornithological knowledge is extremely limited.  I could find no books to help me,[2] and, as I did not care to kill any birds merely to enable me to identify their species, my notes were merely “popular” and not “scientific.”

Shall I confess that I began an erudite work on the birds of Kashmir, but got no further than the Hoopoe?  It began as follows:—­

THE HOOPOE

Early history of.—­Tereus, King of Thrace, annoyed his wife Procne so much by the very marked attention which he paid to her sister Philomela, that she lost her temper so far as to chop up her son Itylus, and present him to his papa in the form of a ragout.

This, naturally, disgusted Tereus very much, and he “fell upon” the ladies with a sword, but, just as he was about to stab them to the heart, he was changed into a Hoopoe, Philomela into a nightingale, Procne into a swallow, while Itylus became a pheasant.

  “Vertitur in volucrem, cui stant in vertice cristae
  Prominet immodicum pro longa cuspide rostrum;
  Nomen epops volucri.”

OVID, Metam. lib. vi.

His crest and patent of nobility.—­Once upon a time, King Solomon, while making a royal progress, was much, incommoded by the powerful rays of the sun, and as he had ascendency over the birds, and knew their language, he called upon the vultures to come and fly betwixt the sun and his nobility, but the vultures refused.  Then the kindly Hoopoes assembled, and flew in close mass above his head, thus forming a shade under which he proceeded on his journey in ease and comfort.