11.

All Assistant-Magistrates on their first arrival in this country, stuffed like Christmas turkeys with abstracts and notes, the pemmican of school-boy learnings, are more or less a weariness and a bore; but the youth who comes out from the admiring circle of sisters and aunts with the airs of a man of the world and the blight of a premature ennui is peculiarly insufferable. Of course he has never known at home any grown-up people beyond the chrysalis stage of undergraduatism, except to receive from them patronising hospitalities and little attentions in the shape of guineas and stalls at the opera, such as good-natured seniors delight to show to promising young kinsmen and friends. Yet his talk is of the studio, the editor's room, and the club; it is flavoured with the argot of the great world, the half world and Bohemia; he flings great names in your face, dropping with a sublime familiarity the vulgar prefixes of "Mr." and "Lord," and he overwhelms you with his knowledge of women and their wicked ways. Clever Ouida, with her tawdry splendours, her guardsmen, her peers, her painters and her Aspasias, and the "society papers," with their confidences and their personalities, have much to answer for in the case of this would-be man of the world.



No. XL



SOME OCCULT PHENOMENA



[October 21, 1880.]

There were thirteen of them, and they sat down to dinner just as the clock in the steeple chimed midnight. The sheeted dead squeaked and gibbered in their graves; the owl hooted in the ivy. "For what we are going to receive may the Secret Powers of Nature and the force of circumstances make us truly thankful," devoutly exclaimed the domestic medium. The spirits of Chaos and Cosmos rapped a courteous acknowledgment on the table. Potage a la sorciere (after the famous recipe in Macbeth) was served in a cauldron; and while it was being handed round, Hume recited his celebrated argument regarding miracles. He had hardly reached the twenty-fifth hypothesis, when a sharp cry startled the company, and Mr. Cyper Redalf, the eminent journalist, was observed to lean back in his chair, pale and speechless. His whole frame was convulsed with emotion; his hair stood erect and emitted electro-biological sparks. The company sat aghast. A basin of soup dashed in his face and a few mesmeric passes soon brought him round, however; and presently he was able to explain to the assembled carousers the cause of his agitation. It was a recollection, a tender memory of youth. The umbrella of his boyhood had suddenly surged upon his imagination! It was an umbrella from which he had been parted for years: it was an umbrella round which had once centred associations solemn and mysterious. In itself there had been nothing remarkable about the umbrella. It was a gingham, conceived in the liberal spirit of a bygone age; such an umbrella as you would not easily forget when it had once fairly bloomed on the retina of your eye; yet an everyday umbrella, a commonplace umbrella half a century ago; an umbrella that would have elicited no remark from our great-grandmothers, hardly a smile from our grandmothers; but an umbrella well calculated to excite the affections and stimulate the imagination of an impulsive, high-spirited, and impressionable boy. It was an umbrella not easily forgotten; an umbrella that necessarily produced a large and deep impression on the mind.

All present were profoundly moved; a feeling of dismay crept over them, defacing their festivity. Tears were shed. Only from one pair of damp eyes did any gleam of hope or comfort radiate.

A distinguished foreigner, well known in the uttermost spirit-circles, wiped from his brow drops of perspiration which some dream had loosened from his brain. He felt the tide of psychic force beating upon the high shores of his heart. He was conscious of a constitutional change sweeping like a tempest over his protoplastic tissue. He felt that the secret fountains of his being were troubled by the angel of spirit-rapping, and that his gross, unbelieving nature stepped down, bathed, and was healed. The Moses of the spirit-wilderness struck the rock of his material life, and occult dynamics came welling forth from the undiscovered springs of consciousness. His mortal statics lost their equilibrium in a general flux of soul. A cyclone raged round his mesmeric aura. He began to apprehend an epiphany of electro-biological potentiality. The fierce light that never was in kerosine or tallow dawned round him; matter melted like mist; souls were carousing about him; the great soul of nature brooded like an aurora of clairvoyance above all; his awful mediumhood held him fiercely in her mystic domination; and things grew to a point. From the focus of the clairvoyant aurora clouds of creative impulse gathered, and sweeping soulward were condensed in immaterial atoms upon the cold peaks of Purpose. Thus a spiritual gingham impressed upon his soul of souls a matrix, out of which, by a fine progenitive effort, he now begets and ejects a materialized gingham into a potato-plot of the garden without.

The thing is patent to all who live above the dead-level of vulgar imbecility. No head of a department could fail to understand it. Indeed, to such as live on the uplands of speculation, not only is the process lucid in itself, but it is luciferous, illuminating all the obscure hiding-places of Nature. It is the magic-lantern of creation; it is the key to all mysticism, to the three-card trick, and to the basket-trick; it sheds a glory upon thimble-rigging, a halo upon legerdemain; it even radiates vagabond beams of splendour upon pocket-picking and the cognate arts. It explains how the apples get into the dumpling; how the milk comes out of the cocoanut; how the deficit issues from the surplus; how matter evolves itself from nothing. It renders the hypothesis of a First Cause not only unnecessary, but exquisitely ludicrous. Under such dry light as it offers to our intelligence the whole epos of Christianity seems a vapid dream.

But I anticipate conclusions. We must go back to the dinner-party and to Mr. Cyper Redalf, who has been restored to consciousness, and who still is the object of general sympathy; for it is not until the disturbance in the distinguished foreigner's nerve aura has amounted to a psychic cyclone that the company perceive his interesting condition, and begin to look for a manifestation. The hopes of some fondly turn to raps, others desire the pressure of a spirit hand, or the ringing of a bell, or the levitation of furniture, or the sound of a spirit voice, the music of an immaterial larynx. Dinner is soon forgotten; the thing has become a seance, hands are joined, the lights are instinctively lowered, and the whole company, following an irresistible impulse, march round and round the room, and then out into the darkness after the soul-stirred foreigner, after the foreigner of distinction. Is it unconscious cerebration that leads them to the potato-plot, or is it the irresistible influence of some Supreme Power, something more occult and more interesting than God, that compels them to fall on their knees, and grub with their hands in the recently manured potato-bed? I must leave this question unanswered, as a sufficiently occult explanation does not occur to me: but suffice it to say that this search after truth, this burrowing in the gross earth for some spiritual sign, appears to me a spectacle at once inspiring and touching. It seems to me that human life has seldom had anything more beautiful and more ennobling to show than these postmaster-generals, boards of revenue, able editors, and foreigners of distinction asking Truth, the Everlasting Verity, for a sign and then searching for it in a potato-field. In this glorious quest every circumstance demands our respectful attention. They search on their hands and knees in the attitude of passionate prayer; they search in the dark; they seize the dumb earth with delirious fingers; they knock their heads against one another and against the dull, hard trunks of trees. Still they search: they wrestle with the Earth: she must yield up her secrets. Nor will Earth deny to them the desired boon. Theirs is the true spirit of devout inquiry, and they are persons of consideration in evening-dress. Nature will unveil her charms. Earth with the groans of an infinite pain, a boundless travail, yields up the gingham umbrella.

We will not intrude upon their immediate rapture as they carry their treasure away with loving hands; but it is necessary to note the means taken to prove, for the satisfaction only of a foolish and unbelieving world, the supernatural nature of the phenomenon. The umbrella is examined under severe test conditions: it is weighed in a vacuum, and placed under the spectroscope. It is found to be porous and a conductor of heat; but it is not soluble in water, though it boils at 500 deg. Fahr. To demonstrate the absence of trickery or collusion everyone turns up his sleeves and empties his waistcoat pockets. There is no room for sleight of hand in presence of this searching scientific investigation. The umbrella is certainly not a supposititious animal; yet it is the umbrella of Mr. Cyper Redalf's boyhood. No one can doubt this who sees him clasp it in a fond embrace, who sees him shed burning tears on its voluminous folds.—THE ORPHAN.



ELUCIDATIONS



No. 1



WITH THE VICEROY

The late Edward Robert Bulwer, First Earl of Lytton (1831-1891), Viceroy and Governor-General of India from April 12, 1876, to June 8, 1880, is here depicted from the superficial point of view of his character as a man, a poet, and a statesman generally current at the time.

Lord Lytton was thoroughly unconventional in all his manners and moods, and in his methods of conducting the affairs of his great office.

As a boy of seven he was already scribbling verses; and he wrote a poem, "The Prisoner of Provence," which turns upon the famous story of the Man in the Iron Mask, only two or three months before his death. In fact, all through Lord Lytton's distinguished career, as his father had done before him, he found recreation in change of employment. As forcibly and eloquently stated by his daughter, Lady Betty Balfour, in her introduction to the 1894 edition of his Selected Poems, "The minds of both were ceaselessly active, and they turned without a pause from one kind of thought and business to another as readily as they turned from either to easy, disengaged conversation. Had the rival calls of his many-sided intellect been at variance, the poet in my father would always have had the preference."

Ali Baba, it may be taken for granted, did not intend to characterise as "a flood of twaddle" the whole of Lord Lytton's verse. Poetry which, as far as published up to 1855, called forth from Leigh Hunt warm praise for its beauties and mercy for its defects, in these words embodied in a letter to Mr. John Forster, the friend and biographer of Charles Dickens.—

"I have read every bit of Owen Meredith's [his now well-known pseudonym] volume, and it has left me in a state of delighted admiration. He is a truly musical, reflecting, impassioned and imaginative poet, with a tendency to but one of the faults of his contemporaries and that chiefly in his minor pieces—I mean the doing too much, and the giving too much importance and emphasis to every fancy and image that comes across him, so that his pictures lose their proper distribution of light and shade, nay, of distinction between great and small. On his greatest occasions, however, he can evidently rid himself of this fault."

During Lord Lytton's Indian career, those who were on political or self-interested grounds opposed to his policy—and there were many such—were wont, as recorded by his daughter, to attempt to discredit the statesman by reiterating that he was a poet.

As a matter of fact, Aberigh Mackay's acquaintance with Lord Lytton's poetry was mainly, if not entirely, based upon a volume edited by N.A. Chick, and published in Calcutta in 1877, quaintly entitled: "The Imperial Bouquet of Pretty Flowers from the Poetical Parterre of Robert Lord Lytton, Viceroy and Governor-General of India."

Our Author's knowledge of Lord Lytton's Indian Administration was necessarily based upon the views—pro and con—expressed by the daily newspaper writers of the period, who wrote, of course, uninitiated in political affairs as a rule, and without those full expositions now embodied in many notable recent publications, official and other, foremost among which we would cite Lady Betty Balfour's History of his Indian Administration, published in 1899, and her edition of her father's personal and literary letters, issued in two vols. in 1906.

Verily "Time tries All," and an impartial and notable summary of Lord Lytton's services to his country, written by the Reverend W. Elvin, is engraven on the monument to his memory in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral, which was designed and partially carried out by the sculptor, Mr. Gilbert.

HE WAS A DIPLOMATIST RICK IN THE QUALITIES, OFFICIAL, AND SOCIAL, BY WHICH AMITY WITH FOREIGN NATIONS IS MAINTAINED.

A VICEROY INDEPENDENT IN HIS VIEWS, RESOLUTE IN ACTION, LOOKING FORWARD TO THE FUTURE.

A POET OF MANY STYLES, EACH THE EXPRESSION OF HIS HABITUAL THOUGHTS.

A MAN OF SUPERIOR FACULTIES HIGHLY CULTIVATED BE LITERATURE, ARDENT IN HIS AFFECTIONS, TENDER AND GENEROUS IN ALL THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF LIFE, LAVISH IN HIS COMMENDATION OF OTHERS, AND HUMBLE IN HIS ESTIMATE OF HIMSELF.

As a good example of Lord Lytton's independent views, and tenderness and generosity in all the circumstances of life, the following incident may be quoted:—

Among many changes in Indian administration which he initiated, and which were severely decried at the time, but the benefits of which experience has amply vindicated, was the amalgamation of Oudh with, or rather annexation to, the North-Western Provinces, the final arrangements being completed at the Imperial Assemblage at Delhi on January 1 1877, with the concurrence—which he had sought previously—of all the principal Talukdars of Oudh there assembled.

The great pageant at Delhi (which formed the subject of Ali Baba's first contribution to Vanity Fair, and which he attended officially as the Guardian of the Raja of Rutlam), so far from being a mere empty show, as then decried by his political foes, enabled the Viceroy to settle, promptly and satisfactorily by personal conferences, a great many important administrative questions. All as recorded by him in his narrative letter of December 23, 1876, to January 10, 1877, to her late Majesty Queen Victoria, which embraced events at Delhi, Pattiala, Umballa, Aligurh, and Agra.

Among the Oudh officials who were dispossessed of their appointments in 1877, some of them with but scanty compensation, was the late Mr. (afterwards Sir) E.N.C. Braddon, a kinsman of the novelist, who held the appointment of Superintendent of Stamps, Stationery, and Registration at Lucknow. Mr. Braddon was an uncovenanted servant of comparatively short service, and eligible for s very moderate compensation. Lord Lytton, unsolicited, took up his case, overruled various objections, obtained liberal terms for Mr. Braddon by which he was able to resign his appointment and proceed to Tasmania, where he entered political life, rising to be Premier and afterwards Agent-General for that Colony in London, and ultimately obtaining, in 1891, his K.C.M.G.

It was to Lord Lytton's personal action—in the face of would-be obsequious apathy in certain quarters—that Aberigh-Mackay, the youngest on the list, was nominated a Fellow of the Calcutta University in 1880, an honour usually reserved for officials of high standing. He then availed himself of that status to bring about the affiliation of the Rajkumar College at Indore to the same University, with, as a matter of course, the concurrence of the Syndicate.



No. 2



THE A.-D.-C.-IN-WAITING

We have here an admirable summary of the highly important personal duties of a tactful A.D.C. to an Indian Viceroy. Not the least important being the superintendence of the Invitation Department. It was in this very connection that an A.D.C. to an Indian Governor, fresh from a West Indian appointment and Society somewhat on "Tom Cringle's Log" conditions, by issuing invitations to a Quality Dance, gave rise, in Southern India, to a social commotion which reacted very unfavourably as regards the efficient working of various departments of his Chief's general administration.

In pre-Mutiny days in India an officer who could not carve meat and fowl well had a very poor chance of such an appointment. Happily the institution of a la Russe fashions in the service of the table has or many years past rendered such qualifications unnecessary.

To the regret of a very wide circle, the "loud, joyful and steeplechasing Lord "—the late Lord William Beresford—alluded to by Ali Baba, died in England in 1900. From 1875 to 1881 he was A.D.C. to Viceroys of India, and it was in the "distant wars" of the Jowaki expedition, 1877-8, in the Zulu War, 1879, where he gained the Victoria Cross, and in the Afghan War, 1880, that his military career was spent.

From 1881 to 1894 Lord William Beresford very ably served Viceroys of India as their Military Secretary. Services which were admirably summed up by a speaker on Dec. 30, 1893, when he was entertained at a farewell dinner at the Town Hall, Calcutta, by 180 friends, who declared that "he had raised the office to a science, and himself from an official into an institution, and acquired a reputation absolutely unique."

The voluminous and noteworthy annals of Indian sport can show no keener sportsman and successful rider of steeplechases and polo player. He won the Viceroy's Cup six times and many other principal events at race-meetings in India.

In 1894 Lord William retired from India, and in England maintained a renowned racing stable, being in addition one of the first to own American horses and employ American jockeys.



No. 3



WITH THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF

An exceedingly important change affecting the power and functions of the Indian Commander-in-chief, together with various other reforms in the military administration of India, were all anticipated, foreshadowed, and—it is believed—largely helped on by this very paper, and others under the general heading of Things in India, contributed by Ali Baba to Vanity Fair during 1879.

Ali Baba, unlike some others that might readily be cited, would doubtless have been foremost in according most generous acknowledgments to the services in the cause of Indian Army reform, rendered in past days by many great Commanders-in-Chief in India.

Chief among such men might be cited Sir Charles James Napier (1782-1853), the conqueror of Scinde, who in 1849 returned to India, nominated by the Duke of Wellington to deal with the crisis caused by the Sikh campaign. Arriving in Calcutta on the 6th May, he at once assumed the command, the term of service of Lord Gough, who had brought the campaign to a successful end, being concluded. Napier's too short administration of little over eighteen months was rather judicial than military, but he effected many reforms on the parade ground and in cantonments.

The newspapers of the day eagerly chronicled the records of the proceedings in which he vigorously combated the vices of intoxication, gambling, insubordination, and other crimes and misdemeanours, both in officers and men of the Queen's and Company's forces alike.

It was during his command that separate barrack-room accommodation was provided for married soldiers. The state of affairs hitherto prevailing may well be imagined by an inspection of the barrack life pictures and caricatures of artists such as Ramberg, Gillray, Rowlandson, and others.

He also founded Soldiers' Institutes, and encouraged soldiers in the Queen's army to rear such pets as monkeys and parrots by regulations for their transport on route and transfer marches, which afforded material for many humorous sketches and paragraphs in the pages of The Delhi Punch. Wise and considerate regulations which are continued in the existing concessions as to the carriage of "soldiers' pets" by troop trains and homeward-bound Indian transports.

Colonel R.H. Vetch (Dictionary of National Biography) admirably sums up Napier's character by recording of him that "his disregard of luxury, simplicity of manner, careful attention to the wants of the soldiers under his command, and enthusiasm for duty and right won him the admiration of his men. His journals testify to his religious convictions, while his life was one long protest against oppression, injustice and wrongdoing. Generous to a fault, a radical in politics, yet an autocrat in government, hot-tempered and impetuous, he was a man to inspire strong affection or the reverse, and his enemies were as numerous as his friends."

Altogether a very different character from that which all and sundry are warned to avoid by the—to a great extent—satirical word-picture recorded by Ali Baba.



No. 4



WITH THE ARCHDEACON

In this article Ali Baba has pourtrayed with infinite skill and geniality the many-sided character of the late Joseph Baly, M.A., who was Archdeacon of Calcutta from 1872 until he retired from India in 1883. Appointed to the Bengal Ecclesiastical establishment in 1861, Mr. Baly served as Chaplain at Sealkote, Simla, and Allahabad until 1870, when, while on furlough in England, he acted as Rector of Falmouth until 1872. In 1885 he was appointed chaplain at the church in Windsor Park, built by Queen Victoria, in which appointment he died in 1909, aged eighty-five.

From the commencement of his Indian career the Reverend gentleman interested himself in that burning question of the employment of the Anglo-Indian and Eurasian community of India; a large indigenous and permanent element in the population, the disposal of which is still a question of very great public importance, and its practical solution a pressing necessity. The Archdeacon had this question, paraphrased by Ali Baba as that of the "Mean Whites," greatly at heart, and the conclusions he arrived at and suggestions made by him from time to time, ably and vigorously summarized in a paper he read before the Bengal Social Science Association on May 1st, 1879, in Calcutta, were productive of considerable good.

Archdeacon Baly's predecessor was the Venerable John Henry Pratt, an attached friend of Aberigh-Mackay's father, to whom his book, From London to Lucknow, published in 1860, was "affectionately inscribed." Certain traits in the character of this Archdeacon known to Ali Baba by tradition are pourtrayed in the concluding portion of the paper.



No. 5



WITH THE SECRETARY TO GOVERNMENT

This article is of a composite nature. At the time it was published in 1879, the foreign policy of Lord Lawrence was a burning question, and in connection with the Afghan War then running its course, renewed attention was directed to the two essays, "Masterly Inactivity" and "Mischievous Activity," first published in The Fortnightly Review in December 1869, and March 1870, respectively, by a comparatively young Bengal Civilian, the late J.W.S. Wyllie, C.S.I. (1835-1870). Beyond the fact that these essays and certain other papers by the same brilliant author on the subject of the policy of the Indian Government with independent principalities and powers beyond the bounds of India were probably in Ali Baba's mind, the character of the supercilious Secretary was very remote from that of Mr. Wyllie.

The typical person held up to derision by Ali Baba has been oft times decried as one very detrimental to good government in India, where a personal and absolute rule must needs obtain for some time to come. By none more pointedly than by the present Secretary of State for India when addressing his constituents at Arbroath on October 21, 1907, when he informed them that "India is perhaps the one country—bad manners, overbearing manners are very disagreeable in all countries—India is the only country where bad and overbearing manners are a political crime." Or, as a prominent Mohammedan in India very well said, "When the English govern from the heart they do it admirably; when they try to be clever, they make a mess of it."

In the restored passage on p. 35 there is delineated a Secretary in striking contrast to the other. The Secretary in the Foreign Department referred to was the late Mr. le Poer Wynne, under whom Aberigh-Mackay had worked at Simla in 1870.



No. 6



H.E. THE BENGALI BABOO

Ali Baba avowedly treats the Bengali Baboo merely as a being "full of inappropriate words and phrases ... and the loose shadows of English thought." Such being the case, it must never be forgotten that he is the product, in every sense of the word, of British modes of purely secular education. Modes which, eminently at the present time, are being gravely called in question.

All of which has been more lately elaborated by "F. Anstey," i.e. Mr. Thomas Anstey Guthrie, in the persons of "Baboo Jabberjee, B.A." and "A Bayard from Bengal."

The broad results of purely secular and mainly literary education might in fact be quite fairly summed up in the reproachful words of Caliban—

"You taught me language; and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse."

Aberigh-Mackay devoted his life in India to counteract the effects of purely literary instruction, which he persistently deprecated; and the last thirty years have undoubtedly witnessed many advances in the same direction, tending to the material progress of India.

Ali Baba trembled for the future of Baboodom, that its tendencies as he depicted them might infect others who might pass, through various stages, into "trampling, hope-bestirred crowds, and so on, out of the province of Ali Baba and into the columns of serious reflection."



No. 7



WITH THE RAJA

In this article we have a vivid picture—mainly—of a type of Indian Noble it was Aberigh-Mackay's aim and life's work in India to avoid creating. That too from the beginning of his career, but more especially in the training, and that not merely in book-learning, he initiated and earned on up to the last days of his life within and without the Residency College at Indore. To paraphrase the language of the then recently appointed Agent to the Governor-General for Central India—Sir Lepel Griffin—in his first Administrative Report, that for 1880-1881, the happy effects of the training some of the leading Chiefs of Malwa received under Aberigh-Mackay were visible in the improved administration of their States. The most notable instance, the Governor-General's Agent points out, being observable in Rutlam. His Highness the "Rajah Saheb having conducted the Government with such ability and success as would do credit to the ablest administrators."

It is well worthy of special notice that the Rajah of Rutlam had been, from a period several years antecedent to Aberigh-Mackay's coming to Indore, his special ward.

Most effectually did Aberigh-Mackay, one of the best all-round sportsmen that Modern India ever saw, counteract the "prodigiously fat white horse with pink points" tendencies of any of his alumni. The description of the kingly cavalcade in this article, vide p. 52, calling forth from John Lockwood Kipling (Beast and Man in India, p. 196), a most competent and discriminating authority, the following eulogy:—

"The late Mr. Aberigh-Mackay (Ali Baba of Vanity Fair), one of the brightest and most original, as well as one of the most generous spirits who ever handled Indian subjects, has drawn a picture in his Twenty-one Days in India of a Raja and his Sowāri [Cavalcade] which could not be bettered by a hair's breadth."

Aberigh-Mackay in his earliest writings—e.g. when, in describing The Great Native Princes in his "Handbook of Hindustan," published in 1875, he enters the "Remark" against the Nawab of Bahawalpur, "A smart boy of fourteen; a good polo-player"—laid great stress on the desirability of training all Indian noblemen's sons in horsemanship of all kinds. That his efforts in this direction were crowned with an abiding and ever-increasing success is well borne out by the testimony contained in an article, by Lieutenant E.R. Penrose, 23rd Bengal N.L. Infantry, accompanying his pictures of "Incidents in the Career of a Polo-Pony," which appeared in The Graphic, April 10, 1886. Lieutenant Penrose then wrote:—

"Polo is such an institution now in this country, that even in the remotest station a couple of enthusiasts may be found who will work heaven and earth to get a game of some sort. I have lately been stationed at Indore, where there is a collegiate school for the sons of native Princes and gentlemen. The head of the college was Mr. Aberigh-Mackay, the author of that popular book 'Twenty-one Days in India.' He was a keen polo-player, and quite imbued his pupils with his ardour, so that, though he is now dead, his memory is green throughout the whole of Central India. The impetus he gave the game has lasted, and consequently, with a few of the senior boys in the school, and some of the men of the troop of Central Indian Horse (who begin to play almost as soon as they can sit a horse), we could always get up a game. Some of the boys are not great riders, but like most natives they have wonderfully good 'eyes,' and rarely miss the ball. Polo-ponies come in very usefully in other ways—such as pig-sticking, for their training makes them so handy that it is easier to tackle a boar on a polo-pony than when mounted on a horse. Besides, they are cheap, and the men can afford a pony where they could not stand the expense of a horse."

Another very notable point in this article is the expression of confidence in the loyalty, as a general rule, of the Nobles of India. This same belief—nay more, conviction—is expressed all through the writings of Ali Baba.

At the same time, voice is given to the thought that "they have built their houses of cards on the thin crust of British Rule that now covers the crater, and they are ever ready to pour a pannikin of water into a crack to quench the explosive forces rumbling below," vide p. 48.

Reuter, in a telegram from Calcutta dated Friday, February 11, 1910, and printed in but few of the London newspapers of the 14th, informs us that:—

"The leading Nobles and Gentry of Bengal have formed an Imperial League for the promotion of good feeling between Indians and the Government, the denunciation of anarchy and sedition, and the education of the people by means of lectures and pamphlets in the views of the Government.

"The Maharajah of Burdwan is president, and Maharajah Sir Pradyat Tagore secretary of the new league."

It must of course be borne in mind that since this article was written by Ali Baba, the formation of the Imperial Service troops, and the Imperial Cadet corps, furnished and in some cases officered by Indian Nobles and their sons, many of whom were educated at Delhi and Indore by Aberigh-Mackay, surely warrants us in believing that more than a mere "pannikin of water" is now available, if need be.



No. 8



WITH THE POLITICAL AGENT

The position of Political Agent, important though it was in 1879, is much more so now. The territories of the Indian Princes are being daily opened up more and more by railways; many of them contain coal, iron, gold, and other minerals in payable quantities, and the development of these resources call for very delicate handling in the matter of friendly advice by Political Agents.

In recent years, nay, at the present time, loud complaints have been published, emanating from experienced and unbiassed sources, that the position of many of the great feudatories of India, who by their treaty rights are much more allies than subjects of His Majesty the King-Emperor, has been reduced to that of a mere figure-head, with no real authority except when they meekly obey the dictation of the British Resident.

It is a fact that many of the Political Agents in 1879 were officers who had served in Madras Cavalry Regiments, the Central India Horse and other corps, but it is also a fact that many of the most successful administrators India has ever seen have been Soldier-Politicals.

Colonel Henderson, so pleasantly cited by Aberigh-Mackay, and happily still alive, was himself a Madras Cavalry Officer, who served as Under-Secretary to the Foreign Department of the Government of India, as Resident in Kashmir and latterly in Mysore, and Superintendent of operations for the suppression of Thagi and Dakaiti.

Our late King's visit to India as Prince of Wales in 1875-6 owed a good deal of its success to Colonel Henderson, who was special officer in attendance, and his services in connection therewith were recognized by a Companionship of the order of the Star of India. It may also be mentioned here that Aberigh-Mackay became his Brother-in-law in October, 1873.



No. 9



WITH THE COLLECTOR

In this sketch, warm with local colour, the real pivot of the great official wheel of Indian administration, "the Collector," is drawn with the exactness due to his importance. Withal very lifelike and picturesque in many of its touches.

Thirty years have of course made great changes in many of the details of life in the districts of an Indian Province, now as a rule connected up by lines of railway. Improved leave rules and many other causes have rendered intercourse with the home country much easier. Whether or no this far easier intercourse is altogether an advantage to the rulers and the ruled is what is termed a "burning question" at the present moment. In a word, that improved communications have not correspondingly increased our sympathy with a new birth in intellect, social life, and the affairs of state, all of which are mainly the results of British rule.

The functions of a Collector, sketched by Ali Baba in an entertaining medley, have increased enormously of late years, and the position is now said to be less desirable than of old, when it was amusingly said of every member of civilian society, that the verb "to collect" was conjugated thus: "I am a collector, you are a collector, he should be a collector, they will be collectors," and so on, ad infinitum.



NOS. 10, 20 AND 35



BABY IN PARTIBUS

This sketch, which may well be termed a beautiful lament over poor Baby, has brought back vividly to many a one touching recollections: a picture in fact which appealed, and continues to appeal, to an audience infinitely wider than that of Anglo-India. The same may be said of the sketches "The Grass-Widow," p. 139; "Mem-Sahib," p. 157, by many considered the best sketch of all; and "Sahib," p. 181. All of them full of that pathos and tenderness akin to, but yet differing widely from, the bantering style of the others, which are also full of allusions and covert references to individuals and affairs of the Anglo-India of thirty years ago.

In "Sahib," however, there are traits of character and other touches taken from the life of one who was—among many other features—a "merry Collector," not yet forgotten by a rapidly decreasing circle of contemporaries. While time and ameliorated conditions have changed the "loathsome Indian cemetery" into something of a garden in which Ali Baba our friend in common would have rejoiced.



No. 11



THE RED CHUPRASSIE

Alas! the Red Chuprassie is still a rift in the lute of Indian administration; a reform in Chuprassies would doubtless be more beneficial to India than any wonder-working nostrum—such as Advisory Councils or extended Legislative Councils.

The cry for reform in Chuprassies, or in other words the underlings of many Departments, is a very old one. Ali Baba's denunciation of the "Red Chuprassie" powerfully expands that one by Sir Alfred Lyall, where in his poem of The Old Pindaree, written in 1866, the "belted knave" is associated with the "hungry retainers" and others forming the camp establishment of an official on tour.

Ali Baba's practice of adequate payment, which he states—in a spirit of banter—to be potent to remove temptation to bribery and corruption, has received attention in connection with recent ameliorations of the terms of subordinate service in India, and it is believed has met with a certain amount of success.

The well-meant but not altogether satisfactory trial of the Gaikwar of Baroda, by a mixed tribunal of Indian Nobles and highly placed British officials, which took place during Lord Northbrook's viceroyalty, is alluded to in the conclusion of the article; in which the Anglo-Indian soubriquet for a subservient person—Joe Hookham, literally jaisa hukam = as may be ordered—is also introduced.



No. 12



THE PLANTER

It is now upwards of thirty years since this genial picture of a veritable "Farmer Prince" was painted—in bold and broad outline, of course. The years that have passed bringing in their train many altered conditions, the most important of all, perhaps, being the replacing of a natural vegetable dye such as indigo by chemically produced substitutes.

Probably in a few more years the still remaining features of the Bengal indigo planter's off duty life as depicted by Ali Baba will have quite disappeared, unless the substitution of sugar planting for that of indigo now receiving considerable attention in various Bengal, and more particularly Tirhoot, districts prove a success.

Anyway, the Macdonalds, the Beggs, and the Thomases, names now, as formerly, prominently identified with the great indigo industry, have been assured of continual remembrance. So prominent, in fact, has the Scotch element among planting families always been that it is said that if any one present at a race, polo, or Christmas week gathering were to shout out "Mac!" from the verandah of the Tirhoot Club, every face in the crowd would be simultaneously turned towards the speaker.

The bantering allusion to "Mr. Caird and The Nineteenth Century," applies to that great authority on many and very varied agricultural subjects, the late Sir James Caird, who died in 1892. In 1878-79 he was deputed to India by the Secretary of State as a member of the Indian Famine Commission called into being by the Strachey Brothers; the general impressions then formed by a six months' tour through India being embodied in the series of articles, entitled "Notes by the Way in India; the Land and the People," which appeared from July to October, 1879, in The Nineteenth Century magazine, thereafter in book form in 1883, and in an augmented form as a third edition in 1884.

For a detailed account of a Bengal indigo planter's life, mainly confined, however, to the processes and surroundings of planting and manufacture, there is no more valuable record than the late Colesworthy Grant's well illustrated book, "Rural Life in Bengal," which was published in 1860. In that work may be found a drawing of "Mulnath House," a glorified illustration of the fast disappearing surroundings of a Lower Bengal planter's residence.



No. 13



THE EURASIAN

In November, 1879, when this "Study in chiaro-oscuro" was published, renewed attention was being directed to the Eurasian community in India, mainly by the discussions in all circles aroused by the publication of the late Archdeacon Baly's Bengal Social Science Association Paper of May in the same year, which dealt with the employment, inter alia, of Europeans of mixed parentage in India; a question which still engages the anxious consideration of many Indian statesmen. Ali Baba's "Study" is not an ill-natured summary of the widespread discussions of 1879, but indeed as far back as 1843, the late John Mawson in his paper, "The Eurasian Belle," which first appeared in the Calcutta newspaper, The Bengal Hurkaru, had approached the social and domestic side of the question, and to some extent may be said to have anticipated Ali Baba.



NOS. 14 AND 17



THE VILLAGER AND THE SHIKARRY

Both of these sketches are examples of what maybe termed Ali Baba's contemplative mood, the villager's life being revealed to us in all its pathos and interest, otherwise than through an atmosphere of statistics and reports—the daily life of probably two hundred million of the inhabitants of India.

Aberigh-Mackay early showed in his book "A Manual of Indian Sport," which, in addition to collecting in small compass lessons taught by many a noted Indian hunter, contains a great deal of original matter useful to every would-be sportsman, that he was well fitted to depict "The Shikarry" in correct and graphic manner and from actual personal knowledge.



NOS. 15 AND 16



THE OLD COLONEL AND THE CIVIL SURGEON

"The Old Colonel" and "The Civil Surgeon," p. 123, are both types of characters that have since practically ceased to exist in India, although fairly numerous in the 1870's.

"The Old Colonel," a relic of the great changes caused by the disappearance of many regiments during the Indian Mutiny, and the alterations in Army organisation due to the introduction of the "Staff corps" system, has disappeared from the scene, having long since attained the pensioned rank for which he was ripening when depicted by Ali Baba.

As regards "The Civil Surgeon," an entirely new state of conditions has altered him also. Even, however, in Ali Baba's time it could not be said—as it was "long ago"—that a medical officer intended for an Indian career, in order to become perfectly qualified need only sleep one night on a medicine chest.

All the same, to those of us who can look back to life in India forty or fifty years ago, there will surely arise visions of many genial old colonels and doctors, full of good stories and much sympathy in health or sickness for those just entering upon an Indian career.

Captain Atkinson, in his book "Curry and Rice," published at the lime of the Indian Mutiny, depicted by pen and pencil individuals who in after years developed into Ali Baba's subjects. Illustrations which may now surely be regarded as valuable records of past Anglo-Indian life and character.



NOS. 19 AND 21



THE TRAVELLING M.P. AND ALI BABA ALONE

"The Travelling M.P." requires no elucidation. He is still with us and has developed greatly during the course of years, in fact, increased facilities of communication between England and India have much increased the species. Happily there are correctives in the shape of adverse votes by constituents which, in some notorious instances at the last Parliamentary elections, have relieved the situation.

As to "Ali Baba Alone," nothing could add to the perfect picture which, among other things, good-naturedly alludes to many surmises and rumours current at the time as to the identity of the Author, leading in some cases to public disclaimers by various highly placed officials and others.



THE TEAPOT SERIES



"SOCIAL DISSECTION" and "THE ORPHAN'S GOOD RESOLUTIONS"

These papers when first published in The Bombay Gazette aroused keen speculation as to their authorship. They are as applicable to Society everywhere as to that of Anglo-India. Greatly appreciated all over India, they were, with the others of the series, reprinted in book form and published shortly before the Author's death in a volume, entitled "Serious Reflections by a Political Orphan," which has long been out of print.



"THE GRYPHON'S ANABASIS"

The amiable and other idiosyncracies—-personal and official—of the late Sir Lepel Griffin, K.C.S.I., who, born in 1840, died on March 9, 1908, having retired in 1889 from the Bengal Civil Service, which he entered'in 1860 by open competition, and of which he was a distinguished ornament, are very well pourtrayed in this article. An article of very tragic interest, because its publication was the indirect cause, in all human probability, of the death of its Author.

This is not the place to recount Sir Lepel Griffin's career in many high places of Indian administration and diplomacy, latterly more particularly in the Punjab and Afghanistan.

Suffice it here to say that in 1880, when Chief Secretary of the Punjab, a post he had then held for upwards of nine years—earning the reputation of being the best occupant of that very important and responsible appointment ever known—Mr. (as he then was) Lepel Griffin was selected by the Viceroy—Lord Lytton—to proceed to Kabul, and arrange for its Government as a prelude to the termination of the British occupation of Afghanistan.

Under the Viceroyalty of Lord Lytton's successor, the Marquess of Ripon, and after anxious negotiations, Abdur Rahman was proclaimed Amir of Afghanistan, July 22, 1880. In a spirit of thoroughly good-natured banter the Gryphon's veritable "Expedition" from Lahore to the seat of Government to receive the Viceroy's instructions, and thereafter Afghanistan-ward to carry them out—made under very different conditions from that one by Cyrus the younger—is amusingly pourtrayed.

Travelling through the provinces then ruled over by the late Sir George Couper and Sir Robert Egerton respectively, until finally Kabul is reached, where Sir Frederick Roberts handed over his powers to the Civil authority, as embodied in the Gryphon. A progress which, as profusely chronicled by the correspondents of the innumerable newspapers, British, Indian, and Foreign, attracted to India by the second Afghan War, is lightly, yet not unkindly, satirized by Aberigh-Mackay under the nom de plums of "Your Political Orphan." Who also in this article gave expression to the general impression of the day, that by entrusting Mr. Lepel Griffin with the direct negotiations, the position of the then Foreign Secretary to the Government of India, Mr. (now Sir) Alfred Lyall had been somewhat ignored.

Be this as it may, for his undoubtedly great services, in which he was very greatly aided by his intimate acquaintance with the Persian language, still the French of Afghanistan and other Central Asian lands in diplomacy and etiquette, Mr. Griffin was created a K.C.S.I., and shortly afterwards appointed Governor-General's Agent in Central India and Resident in Indore—where Aberigh-Mackay was Principal of the Rajkumar College—the College for the "Sons of Nobles"—the first "Eton" established under British rule in India. These appointments Sir Lepel held from 1881 until 1888, when he was appointed Resident at Hyderabad, the last official position he held in India.

The article now under elucidation appeared on March 29 1880, in The Bombay Gazette, then edited by the late Mr. Grattan Geary, whose narrative of a journey from Bombay to the Bosphorus through Asiatic Turkey, published in 1878, did much to revive and stimulate interest in those important countries, where happily British trade and other influences are now being actively commented upon by the press of Western India, and developed by the merchants of Bombay, Karachi, and Western India generally.

Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles, the proprietor of Vanity Fair, who had always warmly appreciated the literary work done for him by Aberigh-Mackay, about this time offered him the editorship of the paper. This post Aberigh-Mackay had virtually accepted.

Shortly before Sir Lepel Griffin took up his appointment as Governor-General's Agent, gossip, more especially at Indore and in Central and Western India, was very busy with surmises as to the fate in store for the writer of this article, as well as many other paragraphs commenting, inter alia, upon Afghan affairs, and, en passant Mr. Lepel Griffin, which had appeared in The Bombay Gazette from February to December, 1880, under the general heading of "Some Serious Reflections." These articles, hitherto anonymous, having being republished in book form, with their authorship avowed, at Bombay in 1880, shortly before the new Resident and Governor-General's Agent arrived at Indore.

The gossips were—as is nearly always the case—quite wrong, for one of the first men to extend a friendly welcome to Aberigh-Mackay when he arrived at Lahore on the 13th August, 1869, to take up his appointment of "Manager of the Government Zoological Collection" was Mr. Lepel Griffin, then the Deputy-Commissioner of the City and District.

Afterwards, at Simla and elsewhere, these two kindred spirits—in many ways—met frequently, and learnt to understand each other thoroughly well. They also had several common friends, civil, military, and non-official; and their literary pursuits in historical directions were also much in sympathy.

In 1881 they were not fated to meet, although Aberigh-Mackay had taken immediate steps to endeavour to do so, as soon as he became aware that a prevalent rumour was abroad to the effect that the Gryphon would—to use a colloquialism—now make it hot for him.

Aberigh-Mackay indignantly repelled any such surmises, and laughed to scorn the idea that Sir Lepel could possibly entertain any revengeful thoughts of the kind that were anticipated by those who knew absolutely nothing of the old and existing intimacies of either of the two men concerned.

To effectually dispel and give the lie to all such insinuations, he arranged to postpone his departure for England until after the arrival of Sir Lepel Griffin at Indore, and then make patent to official and other society the true inward state of affairs.

Aberigh-Mackay was a very keen all-round sportsman, and in the first weeks of December, 1880, had played at Mhow and Indore in the interesting polo matches between the 29th Regiment and the station of Indore, both matches being won by Indore, notwithstanding a good fight by the Regimental team, headed by Major Ruxton.

On the 7th January, 1881, he read and played with the Chiefs and Thakores of the Rajkumar class of his College; on the evening of the 8th he played lawn-tennis in the Residency garden, when he caught a chill. The next day—Sunday—symptoms of tetanus appeared which created anxiety among his relatives and friends. On Tuesday, the 11th January, signs of imminent danger became apparent, and at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, he died, some weeks before the new Governor-General's Agent arrived at Indore.

It is a very pleasing fact that the most eloquent and very evidently heart-felt testimony to the great and abiding worth of Abengh-Mackay's work at Indore and far beyond, came from the very pen of Sir Lepel Griffin in his "Report of the Central India Agency for the Year 1881-82," issued in July, 1883, as follows.—

'The death of Mr Aberigh-Mackay was for Central India, an almost irreparable loss. The patience, tact, and enthusiasm which he brought to his responsible educational duties were worthy of all admiration and those young Chiefs who had the benefit of his guidance will compare most favourably both in acquirements and manners with any students trained under the most favourable conditions in the colleges of British India. It so happened that at the time Mr Mackay was in charge of the Rajkumar College, a large number of important Chiefs were minors, including the Rajah of Rutlam, the junior Chief of Dewar, the Nawab of Jaora, and the two sons of His Highness the Maharaja Holkar. At present there are no Chiefs of the first rank in the Residency College. It will be well if the earnestness and devotion which animated the work of Mr. Abengh Mackay will be felt by those who succeed him.

In Elucidation No. 1—"The Viceroy"—Lord Lytton's personal nomination of Abengh-Mackay to a Fellowship in the Calcutta University has been referred to. This act of noblesse oblige, in the highest sense of the term, was happily known to Abengh-Mackay during his lifetime.



"SOME OCCULT PHENOMENA"

In the autumn of 1880 many strange stories were afloat in India concerning the studies and practices of what is now widely known as occult science, indulged in and made manifest by the late Madame Blavatsky, the authoress of Isis Unveiled, who claimed to possess in a high degree, by nature, those attributes which spiritualists describe (without professing to understand) as "mediumship".

Prominent members of Anglo-Indian society associated themselves with Madame Blavatsky, supported her, and believed in the bona fides of her powers, derived as Madame declared from Eastern "adepts" in the science of Yog-Vidya, as this occult knowledge is called by its devotees.

A science according to some—to others a mere vulgar imposition—with which, as maintained by certain renowned Western exponents, Lord Lytton was well versed and largely imbued, his imagina-tive account of the achievements accomplished by Vril in the Coming Race, being, according to the school and scholars of Madame Blavatsky, altogether inspired from that Eastern fount.

"Mr. Cypher Redalf, the eminent journalist," in the proper person of Mr. A.P. Sinnett, editor of The Pioneer, a daily newspaper published at Allahabad, and then, as now to an increased degree, the leading English newspaper in India, printed in that journal an authoritative statement of various occurrences in Blavatskyian circles at Simla when Madame was on a visit to Mr and Mrs. Sinnett.

It is this statement, the outcome of "the true spirit of devout inquiry ... by persons of consideration in evening dress" which forms the leit motif of Aberigh-Mackay's powerful satire, in which a gingham umbrella, "conceived in the liberal spirit of a bye-gone age," is substituted for an old fashioned breast brooch set round with pearls, with glass at the front and the back, made to contain hair, which, long lost, was stated to have been recovered for its owner as a result of Madame Blavatsky's occult powers.

Powers made manifest at a dinner in Mr. A.O. Hume's house at Simla on Sunday the 3rd of October, 1880, at which were present as guests Mr. and Mrs. Sinnett, Mrs. Gordon, Mr. F. Hogg, Captain P.J. Maitland, Mr. Davison, Colonel Olcott, and Madame Blavatsky.

Most of the persons present believed that they had recently seen many remarkable occurrences in Madame Blavatsky's company, and the conversation largely turned on occult phenomena, in the course of which Mrs. Hume was asked by Madame if there was anything she particularly wished for. After some hesitation Mrs. Hume replied that she was particularly anxious to recover an old-fashioned brooch she had formerly possessed, which she had given away to a person who had allowed it to pass out of her possession.

The brooch having been minutely described as above, and roughly sketched, Madame then wrapped up a coin attached to her watch-chain in two cigarette papers, and put it in her dress, and said that she hoped the brooch might be obtained in the course of the evening.

At the close of dinner she intimated to Mr. Hume that the paper in which the coin had been wrapped was gone. A little later, in the drawing-room, she said that the brooch would not be brought into the house, but that it must be looked for in the garden; and then, as the party went out accompanying her, she stated that she had clairvoyantly seen the brooch fall into a star-shaped bed of flowers. Mr. Hume led the way to such a bed in a distant part of the garden, and after a prolonged and careful search made by lantern light, a small paper packet, consisting of two cigarette papers and containing a brooch which Mrs. Hume identified as that which she had originally lost, was found among the leaves by Mrs. Sinnett.

All this, and a great deal more, including the conviction of all present that the occurrence was of an absolutely unimpeachable character as an evidence of the truth of the possibility of occult phenomena, being carefully embodied in the published statements, which had been duly read over to the party and signed. The publication of the statement aroused a great discussion in the newspapers of the day, by no means confined to India, and gave a powerful impetus to Madame Blavatsky's views.

Mr. Allan Octavian Hume, happily still alive, son of Joseph Hume the great Radical member of Parliament, created C.B. for his very distinguished services in the Mutiny, retired from the Indian Civil Service in 1882 after a notable career in many departments. Ornithologist, and since his retirement following hereditary instincts by organizing and supporting the National Congress, and criticizing much of the policy of the Government of India.

Mr. Sinnett, the leading actor in the affair described above, not long after the publication of the Simla narrative, ended his connection with The Pioneer, and may be regarded as one of the leading spirits of the Theosophical movement, in connection with which he has written many books, and he now holds high office in the London branch of the Society.



NOTES



[A: Lit. Great Ladies, i.e. Wives of Heads of Departments.]

[B: A genus of molluscous animals.]

[C: A primary constituent of matter.]

[D: A slightly narcotic mixture.]

[E: Throne.]

[F: Hindu festivals in honour of the Ganges and the War God respectively.]

[G: Household.]

[H: Official messengers.]

[I: Lit. high-handed.]

[J: Fairs.]

[K: Table attendants.]

[L: I have assumed the Most Honourable Order of the Bath in commemoration of the happy termination of the Afghan War.—A.B.]

[M: Confirmed in the appointment.]

[N: Settlement of the land revenue.]

[O: Children.]

[P: Kitchen.]

[Q: Grooms.]

[R: The chuprassies are official messengers, wearing Imperial livery, who are attached to all civil officers in India.]

[S: Civil servants.]

[T: An old English form of avaunt, begone! Vide "Macbeth," I. iii. 6.]

[U: "Bring me a brandy and soda."]

[V: Low-lying land.]

[W: News.]

[X: An arrangement, a plan.]

[Y: Criminal cases.]

[Z: Land revenue settlement.]

[AA: A water-carrier's leathern bag.]

[BB: Chief Board of Land Revenue in the United Provinces.]

[CC: Equivalent to Sir.]

THE END