Jane is getting along remarkably well with her Hindustani.  I have just found her diary, and hasten to give an extract:—­

“Woke up very early; much bitten by pice.  Tom started off to try and shoot a burra sahib, as he hears and hopes they’ve not yet shed all their horns.”

“He really looked very nice in his new Pushtoo suit, with putty on his legs and chaplains on his feet....  His chickory walked in front, carrying his bandobast.”

“9 A.M.—­Sat down to my solitary breakfast of poached ekkas and paysandu tonga, with excellent chuprassies (something like scones).  After breakfast, tried on my new kilta, which I have had made quite short for walking.  I generally prefer walking to being carried in a pagdandy.”

“Then took another lesson in Hindustani from my murghi, though I really think I hardly require it!  My attention a good deal distracted by the antics of a pair of bul-buls (not at all the same as our coo-coos) in the jungle overhead.”

“7 P.M.—­T. returned after what he called a blank blank day.  He found some bheesties (one of them a chikor ram or wild ghat) chewing the khud on a precipitous dak.”

“They were rather far off, about a mile he thinks, but he couldn’t get any nearer owing to a frightful ghari-wallah with deep piasses which lay between, so he put up his ornithoptic sight for 2000 yards and ’pumped lead’ into the bheesties for half-an-hour.”

“He says he thinks he hit one, but they all went away—­as his chickory remarked—­’ek dam,’ and Tom agreed with him.”

“He fell into a budmash on his way home and was half-drowned, but the chickory, assisted by a friendly chota-hazri, managed to pull him out ... quite an eventful day!”

“10 P.M.—­The body of the ram chikor has just been brought in.  It looks as if it had been dead for weeks, but the doolie, who found it, says that in this climate a few hours is sufficient to obliterate a body....  Anyhow the head and tail seem all right....  Tom says the proper thing to do is to measure something—­he can’t quite remember whether it is the horns or the tail, but the latter seems the more remarkable, so we measured that, and found it to be 3 feet 4 inches.”

“By a little judicious pulling, the chickory, who knows all about measuring things, elongated it to 4 feet 3 inches.”

“This, he says, is a ’Record’—­how nice!”

Wednesday, April 12.—­The place where we tied up was not far from the point where the Jhelum expands into the Wular Lake—­a broad expanse of water, some seven or eight miles wide in places, which holds the proud record of being the largest lake in all India.

The mountains rise steeply from its northern shores, and from their narrow glens, squalls swift and strong are said frequently to sweep over the open water, particularly in the afternoons.  The bold sailormen of Kashmir are not conspicuous for nautical daring—­in fact their flat-bottomed arks, top-heavy and unwieldy, destitute alike of anchor and rudder, are not fit to cope with either wind or wave; they therefore aim at punting hurriedly across the danger space as soon after dawn as may be—­panting with exertion and terror, they hustle across the smooth and waveless water, invoking at every breath the protection of local saints.