It was just ten o'clock by my watch by the time I was ready. Major Street had told me that the wedding was to be at eleven o'clock at St. Judes, so I thought I should have time to go and buy Boy a present on the way. The hotel porter got me what he called a 'phitton gari'—a ramshackle sort of affair, driven by a wild-looking Jehu in dirty blue and yellow and drawn by two skinny horses, their harness tied with string and their food in a sack with a bundle of hay tied on behind. It wasn't at all the kind of conveyance you would choose to take you to a wedding, but I've been to one in a 'dandy' since then, and that's less dignified still. We had just started off when I suddenly remembered. There's something always wrong about the time in India. It's either half an hour too fast or half an hour too slow. It's like the starboard and the port side of a ship, nobody not to the manner born ever can remember which. There's one time known as local and another known as railway, and one is half an hour or so faster than the other—I'm afraid to say which just now on the spur of the moment. If you want to go by train, then the time is either half an hour ahead or behind the local time, I forget which, but it comes a bit awkward if you can't remember when you want to catch a train. Why it should be so nobody knows. Yet everybody passively submits in a helpless sort of way, in spite of the inconvenience of it. Talk about the survival of antiquated ideas at home, why, it's nothing to the survival of them in India. Just think what this uncertainty about
