Chumria rest-house eventually came into view. The midnight meal, which succeeded this long march, was enlivened by blood-curdling stories from the lips of the cook, who, round-eyed with terror, had been awaiting our arrival for some days at this bungalow in the depths of the forest. From the city of Calcutta, where his uneventful life had been passed, into the wilds of the Nepal jungle, was a considerable change for this simple town-bred soul, and the old residential watchman of the rest-house had lost no opportunity of working on his receptive feelings, which had also been well wrought up by sympathetic friends previous to setting out from his ancestral bazaar. In anticipation of the monsters supposed to be lying in wait for him, he had armed himself with a most formidable spear, the head of which had evidently belonged to an antique lance—undoubtedly a weapon of many histories. Originally the property of a swash-buckling Indian cavalryman of a century ago, it now shook in the nervous hand of this unheroic domestic, whose stated intention was to utilize it in warding off the anticipated attack
