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There are said to be two at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree dak-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses "repeats" on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she has been swept by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful one; there are Officers Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose furniture is guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chair; Peshawur possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is something not fever wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad.
Like several other little owls, it sometimes shows itself during the daytime. Once at Mussoorie I noticed a pigmy collared owlet sitting as bold as brass on a conspicuous branch about midday and making grimaces at me. From the owls to the diurnal birds of prey it is but a short step. Next to the warblers, the raptores are the most difficult birds to distinguish one from the other.
In what summer, he wondered, had she come up to the hill station of Mussoorie. "No," he said. "I did not give you the real explanation. Now I will." He nodded towards a girl who was at that moment crossing the ball-room towards the door, upon the arm of a young man. "That's the explanation." Mrs. Linforth looked at the girl and smiled. "The explanation seems to be enjoying itself," she said.
East of Simla the red-billed species is by far the commoner, while to the west the yellow-billed form rules the roost. The vernacular names for the blue-magpie are Nilkhant at Mussoorie and Dig-dall at Simla. This species is like a dull edition of the tree-pie of the plains. It is dressed like a quaker. It is easily recognised when on the wing.
At Mussoorie the natives call it the Puli. Its upper parts are dark grey spotted with black. The wings are glossy greenish black with white spots. The lower parts are reddish. A flock of half-a-dozen or more birds having a starling-like appearance, which twitter like stares and keep to the topmost branches of trees, may be set down safely as spotted-wings.
It is not so much that it is decorous as that it is genuinely good; it is a favourite resort of clergymen and of clergymen's wives. It was at Mussoorie that Miss Priest met Captain Hambleton, a gallant gunner. They danced together at the Assembly Rooms; they rode in company round the Camel's Back; they went to the same picnics at "The Glen." The captain proposed and was accepted.
As the close of the Mussoorie season approached the invitations went out for Bella Priest's wedding, and for "cake and wine afterwards at the house." The wedding-breakfast is a comparatively rare tamasha in India; the above is the formula of the usual invitation at the hill-stations.
He dreams of Bengali Gods, University text-books of education, and the Royal Society, London, England. Next dawn the bobbing blue-and-white umbrella goes forward. On the edge of the Doon, Mussoorie well behind them and the Plains spread out in golden dust before, rests a worn litter in which all the Hills know it lies a sick lama who seeks a River for his healing.
He shot up a new-made road, more like Mussoorie than ever, and did not fall down the hillside even once. An ammunition-mule of a mountain-battery met him at a tight corner, and began to climb a tree. "See! There isn't another place in France where that could happen," said Alan. "I tell you, this is a magnificent country."
'They went into camp, said an elderly Major recalled from the whist-tables at Mussoorie to a sickly Native Regiment, 'they went into camp with two hundred and ten sick in carts. Two hundred and ten fever cases only, and the balance looking like so many ghosts with sore eyes. A Madras Regiment could have walked through 'em. 'But they were as fit as be-damned when I left them! said Bobby.
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