_June_ 17.--It is quite curious that it should be so difficult to find
time to keep up this journal. Mark Twain, in that best of burlesques, _The
Innocents Abroad_ affirms, if I remember rightly, that you could not
condemn your worst enemy to greater suffering than to bind him down to
keep an accurate diary for a year.
It is the inexorable necessity for writing day by day one's impressions
that becomes so trying; and yet it must be done daily if it is to be done
at all, for the only virtue I can attain to in writing is truth; and
impressions from memory, like sketches from memory, are of no value from
the hand of any but a master.
The time set apart for diary-writing is the hour which properly intervenes
between chota hasri and the announcement of my bath; but, somehow, there
never seems to be very much time. Either the early tea is late or bath is
early, or a shikar expedition, with a grass slipper in pursuit of flies,
takes up the precious moments, and so the business of the day gets all
behindhand.
The fly question is becoming serious. Personally, I do not consider that
fleas, mosquitoes, or any other recognised insect pests (excepting,
perhaps, harvest bugs) are so utterly unendurable as the "little, busy,
thirsty fly." It seems odd, too, as he neither stings nor bites, that he
should be so objectionable; but his tickly method of walking over your
nose or down your neck, and the exasperating pertinacity with which he
refuses to take "no" for an answer when you flick him delicately with a
handkerchief, but "cuts" and comes again, maddens you until you rise,
bloody-minded in your wrath, and, seizing the nearest sledgehammer, fall
upon the brute as he sits twiddling his legs in a sunny patch on the table,
then lo--
"Unwounded from the dreadful close "--
he frisks cheerfully away, leaving you to gather up cursefully the
fragments of the china bowl your wife bought yesterday in the bazaar!
How he manages to congregate in his legions in this ship is a mystery.
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