ground beside them would not register lower than from 40° to 44°. The ice is collected very early in the morning, is carried to a store-house, and there pressed together into a solid mass. Though the method does not produce clear, hard ice, it provides a substitute which answers the purpose of cooling bottles and preserving meats very well. We are told in Benares that the process is carried on to so large an extent there that as much as 1,000 maunds (over thirty-five tons) is produced sometimes in a single night.

But we are going to escape from the hot cities of the plain by making a short journey up to the lower ranges of the Himalayas. We can reach Saharunpore, within fifty miles of the foot of the giant Hills,' in six hours by the railway from Delhi, and we shall have time to spend a week in the fresh air of the mountains before retracing our steps to Calcutta.

G

'Mountains, that like giants stand,

To sentinel enchanted land.'-The Lady of the Lake.

ONE would have expected that people living in one of the most extensive flat plains in the world would have a more than ordinary respect for anything like a mountain, and that they would speak of a really lofty mountain range in terms denoting some appreciation of its size. Yet an Anglo-Indian, living from one hot season to another in places where not a hillock is visible, speaks of a journey to the highest mountain range in the world as going up to the hills.' It is almost akin to the supposed habit of the Yankees terming the Atlantic Ocean 'the pool.'

The country between Delhi and Saharunpore is even drier-looking and flatter than the lower part of the great plain of the Ganges. Great patches of sandy waste are more frequent, and trees are more rare. And while the interest of the country diminishes, so does the speed of our train, so that, after getting a thousand miles from Calcutta, we roll along at the pace of only sixteen miles an hour.

Saharunpore is a place of no great size or importance, and after arriving there at midnight we leave again next morning without regretting that we have no more time there.

We have to travel forty-five miles, to Deyra Doon, which is to be our resting-place for the night. A dâk gharry is our conveyance, and we are to change horses every four miles.

Changing horses in a dâk gharry is a somewhat curious proceeding, and very different from what the term will suggest to an English mind. In the first place the horses are such as no respectable animal of that species would recognise as of the same race with himself: he would object to their being called anything better than half-starved 'screws.' Not one of them but looks as if he had been subject to the Yankee experiment of being fitted with a pair of green spectacles and then fed with shavings; two out of three of them are suffering from sore backs and withers, and every other one has a spavin, a splint, broken wind, or some other of the ills that horseflesh is heir to. Not a few would answer to the whole string of vices and infirmities ascribed to the sorry jade in the Taming of the Shrew.' No wonder that a Hindu refuses meat of all kinds, for he treats all his animals so wretchedly that he could not get a good joint out of one of them.

Then the method of starting these animals differs toto cœlo from the orthodox style of setting off a team. The object here is not to hold the horses in till all are ready and then give vent to their impatience to be off, but to get the poor wretches to budge at all. As soon as the ragged ropes and straps which are made to serve as harness are adjusted, the gharrywan' mounts his seat, flourishes his whip, shouts, shrieks, belabours his steeds on back and loins with a sort of frenzied violence, while a couple of horse-boys put their shoulders to each of the back wheels, and make a vigorous attempt to overcome the vis inertia of the vehicle. Presently, off goes the machine at a tearing pace,

the horses, half bewildered, making a frantic effort to run away with it or from it. A couple of hundred yards is passed, while we hold on by door or seat to keep our joints together; then a sudden stop; another series of shrieks, thuds, and howls of execration from the driver; then another spurt;' then perhaps a lucid interval between these fits of frenzy; and so on, till the stage is completed and another begun.

At one station we find that half the horses are out, and, of the other half, only one can stand upon his legs; so for the next stage we submit to be dragged by coolies. As for the gharry,' it is as cranky and creaky as an old bathing machine; and before we reach the end of our journey we can feelingly assert that it surpasses the description written of London 'growlers'—

'They were dirty, they were dusty, they were grimy, they were grim,
They rattled and they jolted till you ached in brain and limb;
The drivers drove so slowly that they drove you to despair,
To your prayers they made no answer, for your threats they didn't care.'

And though the gharrywans expend zeal enough on getting their animals to start, they every now and then relapse into a state of apathy, and the average rate of travelling is scarcely the regulation 'six miles an hour.'

After accomplishing eight-and-twenty miles of our journey, we reach the foot of an isolated range of hills, through which, as the road changes from a dead level to a gentle slope quite steep enough to discourage such steeds as we have described, we are carried in palkees. The road winds through a defile in the hills for a distance of some eight miles, following for a considerable part of that distance the course of a rocky stream.

The hills on either side, apparently of limestone, are broken in many places into fine precipices fringed with wood. The foliage on the gentler slopes is abundant,

though the trees are of no great size: a profuse undergrowth, among which are many ferns, grows beneath their shade.

Emerging from these hills, we enter from the south the Deyra Doon plain, on the further side of which, ten miles distant, rises the outermost range of the Himalayas, 7,000 feet above the sea-level and 4,000 above the plain. Though only a third of the height of the central snowy range behind, this range is near enough to us to shut out the snows from the view. Just as we catch full sight of the mountains, the sun is sinking below the western horizon, and they are tinged with greyish purple; one could almost fancy they are covered with Scotch heather. On the very top of the part of the ridge right opposite to us we can distinguish a few white dots, growing very indistinct in the twilight. An hour afterwards we see that there are lights where these dots were. They are the houses of Landour and Mussoorie, favourite resorts in the Himalayas, in the heats of summer, for refugees from the baking plains. We shall be among the first refugees of the season if we get up there to-morrow.

We reach Deyra after an hour's drive across the fertile plain, well known as one of the largest tea-growing districts in Northern India; we can only distinguish, however, one or two plantations of the useful plant, as we pass along the road.

There is nothing to induce us to stay at Deyra, so early on the morning after arriving there we are off again in a gharry for Rajpore, a village lying at the very foot of the mountains, and immediately below Mussoorie.

An hour's drive brings us to an end for a time of gharry sufferings, for at Rajpore we take either to ponies or our own legs, the road up to Mussoorie, ascending 4,000 feet in seven miles, being too steep for wheeled carriages. Seven