There is infinitely more grace and romance about the Eastern adventurer.  There is very little slashing and hewing to be done there, and what there is, is managed as quietly as possible.  When a Sultan must be rid of the last superfluous wife, she is quietly done up in a parcel with a few shot, and dropped into the Bosphorus without more ado.  The good old-fashioned Rajah of Mudpoor did his killing without scandal, and when the kindly British wish to keep a secret, the man is hanged in a quiet place where there are no reporters.  As in the Greek tragedies, the butchery is done behind the scenes, and there is no glory connected with the business, only gain.  The ghosts of the slain sometimes appear in the columns of the recalcitrant Indian newspapers and gibber a feeble little “Otototoi!” after the manner of the shade of Dareios, but there is very little heed paid to such visitations by the kindly British.  But though the “raw head and bloody bones” type of adventurer is little in demand in the East, there is plenty of scope for the intelligent and wary flatterer, and some room for the honest man of superior gifts, who is sufficiently free from Oriental prejudice to do energetically the thing which comes in his way, distancing all competitors for the favours of fortune by sheer industry and unerring foresight.

I once knew a man in the East who was neither a flatterer nor freebooter, but who by his own masterly perseverance worked his way to immense wealth, and to such power as wealth commands, though his high view of the social aims of mankind deterred him from mixing in political questions. Bon chien chasse de race is a proverb which applies to horses, cattle, and men, as well as to dogs; and in this man, who was a noble type of the Aryan race, the qualities which have made that race dominant were developed in the highest degree.  The sequel, indeed, might lead the ethnographer into a labyrinth of conjecture, but the story is too tempting a one for me to forego telling it, although the said ethnographer should lose his wits in striving to solve the puzzle.

In September, 1879, I was at Simla in the lower Himalayas,—­at the time of the murder of Sir Louis Cavagnari at Kabul,—­being called there in the interests of an Anglo-Indian newspaper, of which I was then editor.  In other countries, notably in Europe and in America, there are hundreds of spots by the sea-shore, or on the mountain-side, where specific ills may be cured by their corresponding antidotes of air or water, or both.  Following the aristocratic and holy example of the Bishops of Salzburg for the last eight centuries, the sovereigns of the Continent are told that the air and waters of Hofgastein are the only nenuphar for the over-taxed brain in labour beneath a crown.  The self-indulgent sybarite is recommended to Ems, or Wiesbaden, or Aix-la-Chapelle, and the quasi-incurable sensualist to Aix in Savoy, or to Karlsbad in Bohemia.  In our own magnificent