punkah

I retreated from there, and cross- ing the dining room--a very bare apartment with a motionless punkah hanging over the centre table --I knocked at a door labelled in black letters: "Chief Steward."

The tiffin was laid on one end only of the long table, and the punkah was stirring the hot air lazily--mostly above a barren waste of polished wood.

He cast his eyes up to the punkah and that was all.

Enor- mous punkahs sent from on high a gentle draught through that immaculate interior and upon our perspiring heads.

But that was very long ago,' he made as to brush it all away with a thin brown hand - 'and since then, and especially in the nights under the punkah at the madrissah, I have thought very greatly.'

Change of scene, service, and surroundings were the breath of his little nostrils, and thinking of the neat white cots of St Xavier's all arow under the punkah gave him joy as keen as the repetition of the multiplication-table in English.