Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/648

 . 30, 1861.] “Oh, no, nothing of the sort; it’s a cat’s regulation; he’s never allowed to see his mother-in-law: will you believe it, he’s lived in that mud-hut, or another just like it, which only contains three rooms and a kitchen, none of ’em much bigger than a closet, for nearly four years with his wife and her mother, and never yet seen the latter lady in his life! What do you think of that?”

“Oh, nonsense!” said Jephson, while Dan gave his opinion that it was too good to be true.

“It is true for all that,” said I. “I don’t doubt his word, for he can have no object in gammoning me; but I’m going too fast, for one day he did see her ancles, as she was scuttling away behind the curtain when he came in rather suddenly.”

“Well, and is he glad or sorry?”

“He has no opinion on the point that I know of: the thing is never contemplated among their caste. Mothers-in-law always reside as the family skeletons in English houses, which are never seen.”

“And upon my word,” said Dan, waving his cheroot aloft, “the most sensible thing I’ve heard for these many days past; and it’s a custom we ought to introduce among Englishmen; I’ve often thought that if it wasn’t for the old woman I’d take a wife myself.”

Dan, like myself, had about sixpence a day to amuse himself with, when his dinner, servant, and washing were paid; and out of that he contrived to spend not one, but four or five half-crowns. A great catch he would have been for any wailing Belgravian matron with a quiet daughter or two.

“Confound all mothers-in-law,” said he, as he threw himself on the lemon grass couch, “and for the matter of that, fathers-in-law as well; but especially the first, by a thousand to one,” with which heavy reflection on those relationships in social life, he smoked himself to sleep.

Before lying down, I summoned David the faithful to counsel, and ordered him, upon pain of horrible penalties, to have coffee ready before sunrise, and to fin the chatties over night with water for bathing. Then, I set to work to clean the guns, and make other preparations, so as to leave nothing whatever for the morning. No fear of weather in this climate when projecting any little expedition; no sudden clouding over of the sky, and scattering of all your pleasant plans to the winds on this account. For six months at a time, the wind lies in one direction; and, then, like a good lawyer, it turns round and lies in exactly the opposite direction. The rains come at fixed times, nay, one might almost say, fixed hours; and if Murphy published his almanack in these latitudes, he might actually, to his own astonishment wake up morning after morning, and find himself a true prophet!

is out of the twenty-four, but one short hour, during which in the central tropics, the incessant buzz of animal life appears to rest and pause. In that brief sixty minutes or so, before the first streak in the east heralds the rapid rise of the King of Day, all nature, even in the densest forest, appears hushed and still. Often have I awoke, and listening in the pitchy darkness for the accustomed sounds, which would indicate roughly the time of night, soon discovered, by the silence, the quick approach of daylight. The roving night-hunters had slunk back to their lairs, the jackal had buried himself again in his den, and the tatties of the natives who rise before the sun, still hermetically closed the doors of their windowless, leaf-thatched huts. The work of life was suspended, but the material labour of nature, which never ceases, was heard in the nearer murmur of the river, ever rushing on and on, and frittering away its rocks and banks for some new deposit hereafter to be uplifted from the bed of ocean. Hark! from the boughs of some bamboo, dropping over its rapid current, comes the sharp “Hoo” of a monkey; he has untucked his head from between his legs, and looking out into the darkness recognised—by senses keener than mine, the approach of light; his call is answered, and rapidly taken up among his mates, and I know as well, as if I had the best chronometer hanging by me, that in a quarter of an hour it will be broad daylight. Little by little, I lose the pleasant, soothing companionship of the rippling water, itself lost and mingled alternately in the busy sounds which the wary sentinel has evoked from the throats of the vast multitudes of the busy creatures by whom we are surrounded. I fancy, suddenly, that it is lighter, then I am sure it is. Up, to spring and plunge into a bath, is the work of an instant, and before I have finished throwing three chatties of water over my head, the east has broken into broad flames of fire. Ten minutes more, and when David, the laggard, brings in the coffee, the sun is over the horizon; the fairy labourers have continued the building of their mysterious ark; the little copper-coloured children are running about the road, and the doves are cooing lovingly from the nearest thickets. The work of the day is fairly begun, and we must not be sluggards, thinks I to myself, as David patiently stands with his steaming tray before the couch of my friends. He turns appealingly to me, and I see the Doctor, gun in hand, at the end of the road: there was no time for buffoonery.

“Coffee!” I roared in a voice of thunder, “Wake up!”

Lazily and heavily, they rolled off the stretchers, waking with that peculiar, unrefreshed, parched feeling belonging to tropical rest; and in a few minutes, during which I went out to meet the doctor, they joined us, gun in hand, at the wicket gate.

“The sooner, sir, we start, the better,” said the Doctor, “before it gets too hot, as it is a long walk across the paddy-fields: I have brought some of the men to carry the guns and breakfast.”

The breakfast was simply hard-boiled eggs and biscuits; we depended upon finding coffee in any cottage, and Bass’s ale I positively interdicted; as I knew how impossible and even dangerous it was to walk in the blazing sun after that fascinating beverage.