Published: Civil and Military Gazette, 7 August 1885.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 2 (28/2, p. 21).

Text: Civil and Military Gazette.

Notes: Written in Simla, where RK spent three months in 1885, in good health. But he was soon to return to Lahore and to renewed bouts of fever.

Reprinted in Kipling's India: Uncollected Sketches.

A brisk canter in May on a pulling horse; violent perspiration, followed by twenty minutes’ lounge at the public gardens, where the flooded tennis courts reek like so many witches’ cauldrons and the Enemy is upon you. Neither Mrs. Lollipop's banalities, the maturer charms of the Colonel's wife, nor the fascinations of a gin and tonic at the peg table will keep him at bay. With the dreary foreknowledge, born of many previous experiences, you shall recognize that for the next twelve hours at least, you are “in for it;” and shall communicate the fact with a sickly smile to your friends. The instinct of the stricken wild beast for rest and retirement drives you to your bachelor quarters. Man's wisdom recommends quinine and an early retreat bedward. Your pony, finding that you sit much after the fashion of a sack of flour, and are to be dislodged at any moment, mercifully forbears putting his knowledge to practical use, and walks home in the twilight soberly. He is stepping, you can swear, on wool; the reins thickening and lengthening in the most marvellous manner throughout the journey. Finally four ponderous hawsers control a huge head twenty feet away, and there is no end to the white line of the mall. It runs straight as an arrow into the sunset, whence hot breezes, bearing on their wings the choking savour of a hundred brick kilns, fly out to meet and buffet you in the saddle. A grey backed, red bellied cloud closes the vista; and as you gaze, you are conscious of a feeling of irritation. Somehow or other it has got into your head and lies like a red-hot bar just below your hat-brim. Decidedly tonight's experiences will be lively.