As it is, I can only say that of course a highly cultivated Indian gentleman like Mr Bhosh would not dream of presenting himself at any upper-class entertainment—even a Baronet's—in so free and easy a garbage as a smoker's jacket. Were he to be guilty of such want of savoir faire he would inevitably incur some penalty kick or other.
Moreover, at these functions the hired musicians are never compelled to remove their shoes and stockings.
Another correction I hazard with rather less confidence, as I am unable at this moment to consult any authorised work on ducal head coverings. But I am practically certain that all the duchesses whom I have had the privilege to encounter at fashionable soirées wore coronets surmounted with golden balls, and of an altogether different pattern from the very humdrum concern which Mr Pahtridhji has thought proper to represent on the Duchess of Dickinson's cranium.
I fear I must again ask the critic's kind indulgence for an illustrator who has only too obviously never figured as the hailfellow well-met in aristocratic London saloons.
H. B. J.
AUTHOR'S NOTE ON ILLUSTRATION No. II.
As I feared, a tolerably keen eye will detect, almost at a glance, that my young native illustrator—though undeniably gifted—has little or no personal acquaintance with the English surroundings he so rashly professes to depict.
Very curiously, he has succeeded just where I should have expected him to fail, and vice versâ!
For the students are quite correctly represented in their collegiate caps and robes, whereas the police-officer is furnished with far too excessive a superfluity of weapons, nor do policemen in England, to my knowledge, wear plumes in their helmets, or chest-protectors embroidered with the initials E.R.
But it is in the presentment of the irate cow that Mr Pahtridhji displays the most inexcusable ignorance. The merest tyro could have informed him that animals of this Brahminical type are very unfamiliar objects in Anglo-Saxon landscapes!