If you can get a month’s holiday, of course you run up to the hills, where at an elevation of 7000 feet above the sea level, you find yourself in a charming climate and beautiful scenery. The Governor-General and all the heads of departments go up now regularly for six months out of the twelve, like sensible men, for which they get well abused by the press, the editors being obliged to stay in the hot plains. Men who can afford it send their wives and children up every hot weather, and run up there when they can get short leave. It is expensive work, but if you want to keep your children alive, there is no resource but the hills or England; they wither and die in the plains like plucked flowers.
In the cold weather, life is much better; the absentees return from the hills and society rouses itself up for a little gaiety. If you are a sportsman, you can generally get shooting of some sort, and occasionally fishing, or you may have a spell of life in tents, and go about like the patriarchs of old, literally “with your flocks and your herds and your little ones,”—for you take every single thing with you, and travel at the rapid pace of ten or twelve miles a day. The duplicate tents go on the previous night on bullock-carts, or camels, and when you ride to your new camp in the morning, you find them ready pitched under a clump of trees, and breakfast waiting; after which you set to your work as if at home. The tent you have slept in was struck when you started, and travels on during the day at the rate of a mile an hour, for bullocks won’t be hurried and the roads are not over good. In the evening, the elders of the village come and pay their respects to you, chat about the state of the crops, or the amount of fever in the district, which generally results in a request to you for some medicine, especially quinine. You may go out for an hour or two into the neighbouring sugar or mustard fields, and knock over some peafowl or partridge; after which it is time for dinner, and then cold enough for a camp fire. There are few who do not enjoy camp life, for a time at least; when you have to go about alone, _i.e._ with no fellow-countryman, and may not hear your own language spoken for four or five months together, it is apt to get monotonous.