Page:MacGrath--The luck of the Irish.djvu/260

 dren around him, his children and his children's children.

This isn't a guide-book. It is eight months or more in the life of a young man who was vitally interested in living, who was making his boyhood dreams come true by the sheer force of will. If the fulfilment was not exactly in conformity with the conception, that was due to these unromantic times. If I attempted to chronicle all the things that happened to him, along with a complete itinerary of his travels, I should require the lease of another ninety-nine years.

His principal recollections of India were dung fires at night, tigers (in cages), apes, color, swarming people, and temples which resembled his bedroom windows on frosty winter mornings. Among other things, he arrived at that painful and critical moment when he must make his choice, eschew hotel labels or buy new suit-cases, there being no more room on those he had.

As for his dreams, he knocked down cocoanuts by hand and drank the milk; he picked tea-leaves, cardamon seeds, spices; he rode camels and donkeys; he passed through the tail end of a typhoon; and he rode from Jaipur to ancient Amber on the state elephant, howdah, spangles, and all.

In fact, he had a Durbar all by himself. The natives, upon beholding the huge pachyderm, rheumatic and disgruntled, decked out in all his giddy paraphernalia, concluded that some intimate friend of the British Raj was passing, and