_27th February 1894._
The sky is every now and then overcast and again clears up. Sudden little
puffs of wind make the boat lazily creak and groan in all its seams. Thus
the day wears on.
It is now past one o'clock. Steeped in this countryside noonday, with its
different sounds--the quacking of ducks, the swirl of passing boats,
bathers splashing the clothes they wash, the distant shouts from drovers
taking cattle across the ford,--it is difficult even to imagine the
chair-and-table, monotonously dismal routine-life of Calcutta.
Calcutta is as ponderously proper as a Government office. Each of its days
comes forth, like coin from a mint, clear-cut and glittering. Ah! those
dreary, deadly days, so precisely equal in weight, so decently
respectable!
Here I am quit of the demands of my circle, and do not feel like a wound
up machine. Each day is my own. And with leisure and my thoughts I walk
the fields, unfettered by bounds of space or time. The evening gradually
deepens over earth and sky and water, as with bowed head I stroll along.