Required, a hint for a summer's excursion;
Will anyone proffer a word of advice,
Say where may a gentleman, bent on diversion,
Be certain of pleasure at moderate price?
Dalhousie takes seventeen hours to go ter
(How hard are good rhymes!) and is deluged with rain,
While the people who live on the top of Bakrota
Have a Mall of their own and are 'cuts' with Potrain.
And Murree's mere Pindi, or something too near it,
With babies and Ayahs pervading the Mall—
A halting place solely for men who Kashmir it,
With a season that isn't a season at all.
There's merry Mussoorie, dégagée and breezy—
All tail and no head which is pleasant ...perhaps;
Where life flows along in one big 'free and easy',
And those who aren't 'Johnnies' and 'sportsmen' are 'chaps'.
There's Simla, a trifle less high than its prices,
Where you must wear good clothes for six months of the year—
With a false reputation for long deceased vices—
As dull as Dalhousie and ten times as dear.
Oh! what is the good of three–farthing frivolity,
On the lee of a Khud with the monkey and crow?
The wise man will seek metropolitan jollity,
Will save up his leave for three seasons and go.
