Page:A Bayard from Bengal.djvu/37

 AUTHOR'S NOTE ON ILLUSTRATION No. I.

I feared, a tolerably keen eye will detect, almost at a glance, that my young native illustrator—though undeniably gifted—has little or no personal acquaintance with the English surroundings he so rashly professes to depict.

Very curiously, he has succeeded just where I should have expected him to fail, and vice versâ!

For the students are quite correctly represented in their collegiate caps and robes, whereas the police-officer is furnished with far too excessive a superfluity of weapons, nor do policemen in England, to my knowledge, wear plumes in their helmets, or chest-protectors embroidered with the initials E.R.

But it is in the presentment of the irate cow that Mr Pahtridhji displays the most inexcusable ignorance. The merest tyro could have informed him that animals of this Brahminical type are very unfamiliar objects in Anglo-Saxon landscapes! H. B. J.