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108 regarded as dull from its sameness. But Thomason would be thinking of all the objects which at every moment met his eye in relation to the common life, the daily round, the trivial task, of the native population. He would be scanning the roadway and its material, the police stations, the fields and their boundaries, the soil and agriculture, the wayfarers, the traffic, the means of rural and mercantile transport. He had in Bengal been used to see bamboo cottages with thatched roofs festooned by creepers. But now he perceives nought save flat-roofed houses of baked earth, plain even to ugliness. Still these were the homes of his people, and the comfort of their interior would be near to his thoughts. Elsewhere the country is more attractive, and occasionally attains the acme of attractiveness for a mind like his. From the confluence of the two venerated and classic rivers at Allahábád, eastwards, things of beauty on the banks of the united Gangetic stream would present themselves till he reached Benares. In that unique abode of Hindu faith and learning he might feel, as his father once felt, repulsion at the scenes in and about the temples; but he could not fail to marvel at the long river-frontage of the much-thronged city. Moving north-eastwards, he would revisit his own Azamgarh, fraught with memories of homely happiness and of high enterprise undertaken with the ardour of early manhood. He will exchange countless greetings with the natives, who would evince all the genial tact of their race in recalling themselves to the remem-