Here, There and Everywhere

So kindly a reception have the public accorded to "The Days Before Yesterday" that I have ventured into print yet again.

This is less a book of reminiscences than a recapitulation of various personal experiences in many lands, some of which may be viewed from unaccustomed angles.

The descriptions in Chapter VIII of cattle-working and of horse-breaking on an Argentine estancia have already appeared in slightly different form in an earlier book of mine, now out of print.

F. H.

London, 1921.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

An ideal form of travel for the elderly--A claim to roam at will in print--An invitation to a big-game shoot--Details of journey to Cooch Behar--The commercial magnate and the station-master--An outbreak of cholera--Arrival at Cooch Behar Palace-Our Australian Jehu--The shooting camp--Its gigantic scale--The daily routine--"Chota Begum," my confidential elephant--Her well-meant attentions--My first tiger--Another lucky shot--The leopard and the orchestra--The Maharanee of Cooch Behar--An evening in the jungle--The buns and the bear--Jungle pictures--A charging rhinoceros--Another rhinoceros incident--The amateur Mahouts--Circumstances preventing a second visit to Cooch Behar

CHAPTER II

Mighty Kinchinjanga--The inconceivable splendours of a Himalayan sunrise--The last Indian telegraph office--The irrepressible British Tommy--An improvised garden--An improvised Durbar hall--A splendid ceremony--A native dinner--The disguised Europeans--Our shocking table-manners--Incidents--Two impersonations; one successful, the other the reverse--I come off badly--Indian jugglers--The rope-trick--The juggler, the rope, and the boy--An inexplicable incident--A performing cobra scores a success--Ceylon "Devil Dancers"--Their performance--The Temple of the Tooth--The uncovering of the Tooth--Details concerning--An abominable libel--Tea and coffee--Peradeniya Gardens--The upas tree of Java--Colombo an Eastern Clapham Junction--The French lady and the savages--The small Bermudian and the inhabitants of England

CHAPTER III

Frenchmen pleasant travelling companions--Their limitations--Vicomte de Vogue--The innkeeper and the ikon--An early oil-burning steamer--A modern Bluebeard--His "Blue Chamber"--Dupleix--His ambitious scheme --A disastrous period for France--A personal appreciation of the Emperor Nicholas II--A learned but versatile Orientalist--Pidgin English--Hong-Kong--An ancient Portuguese city in China--Duck junks--A comical Marathon race--Canton--Its fascination and its appalling smells--The malevolent Chinese devils--Precautions adopted against--"Foreign devils"--The fortunate limitations of Chinese devils--The City of the Dead--A business interview

CHAPTER IV

The glamour of the West Indies--Captain Marryat and Michael Scott--Deadly climate of the islands in the eighteenth century--The West Indian planters--Difference between East and West Indies--"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die"--Training-school for British Navy--A fruitless voyage--Quarantine--Distant view of Barbados--Father Labat--The last of the Emperors of Byzantium--Delightful little Lady Nugent and her diary of 1802--Her impressions of Jamaica--Wealthy planters--Their hideous gormandising--A simple morning meal--An aldermanic dinner--How the little Nugents were gorged--Haiti--Attempts of General Le Clerc to secure British intervention in Haiti--Presents to Lady Nugent--Her Paris dresses described--Our arrival in Jamaica--Its marvellous beauty--The bewildered Guardsman--Little trace of Spain left in Jamaica--The Spaniards as builders--British and Spanish Colonial methods contrasted

CHAPTER V

An election meeting in Jamaica--Two family experiences at contested elections--Novel South African methods--Unattractive Kingston--A driving tour through the island--The Guardsman as orchid-hunter--Derelict country houses--An attempt to reconstruct the past--The Fourth-Form room at Harrow--Elizabethan Harrovians--I meet many friends of my youth--The "Sunday" books of the 'sixties--"Black and White"--Arrival of the French fleet--Its inner meaning--International courtesies--A delicate attention--Absent alligators--The mangrove swamp--A preposterous suggestion--The swamps do their work--Fever--A very gallant apprentice--What he did