I have also purchased some cartridges of a very pleasing colour, a hunting knife, and a shot belt and pouch, and if I can only procure some inexpensive kind of sporting hound from the Dogs' Home, I shall be forewarned and forearmed cap à pie for the perils and pleasures of the chase.
Miss Wee-Wee did earnestly advise me, inasmuch as I was about to go amongst the savage hill tribes of canny Scotians, to previously make myself acquainted with their idioms, &c., for which purpose she lent me some romances written entirely in Caledonian dialects, also the compositions of Hon. Poet Burns.
But hoity-toity! after much diligent perusal, I arrived at the conclusion that such works were sealed books to the most intelligent foreigner, unless he is furnished with a good Scotch grammar and dictionary.
And mirabile dictu! though I have made diligent inquiries of various London booksellers, I have found it utterly impossible to obtain such works in England—a haughty and arrogantly dispositioned country, more inclined to teach than to learn!
How many of your boasted British Cabinet, supposed to rule our countless millions of so-called Indian subjects, would be capable to sit down and read and translate—correctly—a single sentence from the Mahábhárat in the original?
Not more, I shrewdly suspect, than half a dozen at most!
So it is not to be expected that any more interest would be displayed in the language and literature of a country like Scotland, which is notoriously wild and barren and less densely populated and productive than the most ordinary districts of Bengal.
Oh, you pusillanimous Highland chiefs and other misters! how long will you tamely submit to such offhanded treatment? Will the day never come when, with whirling sporrans and flashing pibrochs you will rise against the alien oppressor, and demand Home Rule, together with the total abolition of present disdainful British insouciance?
When that day dawns—if ever—please note this piece of private intelligence from an authorised source: Young Bengal will be with you in your struggle for Autonomy. If not in body, assuredly in spirit. Possibly in both.
I say no more, in case I should be accused of trying to stir up seditious feelings; but, as a patriotic Baboo gentleman, my blood will boil occasionally at instances of stuck-up English self-sufficiency, and the worm in the bud, if nipped too severely, may blossom into a rather formidable serpent!