The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated

By GMW Wemyss

With:
More than 350 annotations;
Three prefatory essays;
Every literary allusion, plant, and animal identified, with their cultural and religious connotations set out;
All the references that Victorian and Edwardian readers should have had to heart; and
Literary cross-references to later works influenced by Kipling:
This is the critical, annotated edition of the Jungle Book stories in which Mowgli appears.

Rudyard Kipling's tales of Mowgli, the Man-cub, raised by wolves, published in The Jungle Book, The Second Jungle Book, and Many Inventions, are not for children only. They have never been out of print, and they have shaped the English language and the British (and American) psyche to an extraordinary degree.

The stories that concern Mowgli's adventures, from his adoption by Mother and Father Wolf to his marriage and taking service in the Indian Forestry as an adult, have been collected, placed in their internal chronological order, and annotated in this volume by the historians GMW Wemyss - author of the account of Chamberlain's fall and Churchill's selection as Prime Minister, in The Confidence of the House: May 1940 - and Markham Shaw Pyle, author of'Fools, Drunks, and the United States': August 12, 1941, the story of how America, four months before Pearl Harbor, kept its army in being by one vote in the Congress, and of 2013's account of the correspondence between George Washington and Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, Benevolent Designs.

As in their previous work in this vein, The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Children and Sensible Adults (or, possibly, Adults and Sensible Children), Mr Wemyss and Mr Pyle, the first a British historian, the second, an American historian, have ranged widely in annotating this classic work. It is prefaced with essays on imperialism, dryland farming, the climate and geography of Madhya Pradesh, Kipling's tribalism and his opposition to the Kaiser's nascent imperial adventurism, and the image of the Mother-figure. Over three hundred footnotes accompany the text, delving into ecology; irrigation; literary echoes from Bunyan, the Authorised Version, Milton, Blake, Chaucer, and Shakespeare; Kipling's literary influence upon Tolkien and Lewis; wergild; snake-cults and Greek oracles; ethnology; mana and tapu; Anglo-German and Anglo-Russian relations; forestry; and any number of subjects with these, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and All.

If you wish to enjoy these tales with deeper understanding; if you wonder what Buldeo has to do with Mr Sherlock Holmes' antagonist Dr Roylott; if you have ever wondered just why a Gond hunter reminds you of the frontman of Jethro Tull; or if you simply want a cracking good read of stories you but half-remember: here is your book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bapton Books
• Release date: Jul 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301155477

GMW Wemyss

Parliamentary historian, chronicler of Titanic’s sinking and Churchill’s ascent, annotator of Kipling and of Kenneth Grahame: GMW Wemyss lives and writes, wisely pseudonymously, in Wilts. Having, by invoking the protective colouration of tweeds, cricket (he was a dry bob at school), and country matters, somehow evaded immersion in Mercury whilst up at University, he survived to become the West Country’s beloved essayist; author or co-author of histories of the Narvik Debate, the fall of Chamberlain and the rise of Churchill, of 1937 – that year of portent – and of the UK and US enquiries into the sinking of Titanic; and co-editor and co-annotator of Kipling’s Mowgli stories and Kenneth Grahame.

Book preview

The

Complete

Mowgli Stories,

Duly Annotated

Rudyard Kipling

annotated and edited

by

GMW Wemyss

&

Markham Shaw Pyle

Bapton Books

Copyright 2011, Second Edition 2012, Second Edition Revised 2013

by Bapton Literary Trust No 1

(for GMW Wemyss & Markham Shaw Pyle)

All rights reserved

2d edition revised

Published by Bapton Books at Smashwords for GMW Wemyss & Markham Shaw Pyle

Smashwords Edition, Licensing Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment, and yours alone. This ebook mayn't be re-sold or given away to others. Should you wish to share this book with others, do please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or should it not have been purchased for your use only, then do please return to Smashwords.com and purchase a copy of your own. We shall be greatly obliged to you for respecting the hard work of our authors and this publishing house.

Book design by Bapton Books

A note to the reader: it is the aspiration of this imprint, small though Bapton Books be, to have as few errors and literals – 'typographical errors', misprints – as occur in any average Oxford University Press publication (which, alas, in these thin and piping times, gives us a margin of perhaps five or ten). Any obliging corrections shall be gratefully received.

Dedication

This second edition is dedicated by Mr Pyle to Blake, Scott, Derya, Matt, Little-Jack, Maggie, and Jack Z;

by Mr Wemyss, to Olympia, Anthony, Oliver, Gemma, Pippa, Wills, Margery, and Colin;

and, by both, to all who were so very kind to the first edition.

About the editors:

GMW Wemyss lives and writes, wisely pseudonymously, in Wilts. Having, by invoking the protective colouration of tweeds, cricket (he was a dry bob at school), and country matters, somehow evaded immersion in Mercury whilst up at University, he survived to become the author of The Confidence of the House: May 1940 and of Sensible Places: essays on time, place & countryside; co-author of The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays & Observations; The Bapton Books Sampler: a literary chrestomathy; and When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic; and co-editor and co-annotator of The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated, and The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults). He is also the co-author of '37: the year of portent.

Markham Shaw Pyle, author of Fools, Drunks, and the United States: August 12 1941, and of Benevolent Designs: The Countess and the General: George Washington, Selina Countess of Huntingdon, their correspondence, & the evangelizing of America, holds his undergraduate and law degrees from Washington & Lee. He is a past or current member of, inter alia, the Organization of American Historians; the Society for Military History; the Southern Historical Association; the Southwestern Social Science Association; the Southwestern Historical Association; the Southwestern Political Science Association; the Virginia Historical Society; and the Texas State Historical Association. He is the co-author of The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays & Observations; The Bapton Books Sampler: a literary chrestomathy; and When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic; co-editor and co-annotator of The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated, and The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults); and co-author of '37: the year of portent.

Jointly, they are the partners in Bapton Books.

The

Complete

Mowgli Stories,

Duly Annotated

Rudyard Kipling

annotated and edited

by

GMW Wemyss

&

Markham Shaw Pyle

Bapton Books

Contents

PREFATORY ESSAYS

A note upon the text

Kipling and the Kaiser

Mr Pyle on dry-land farming and ranching

Mothers' sons and motherlands

THE STORIES, DULY ANNOTATED

PREFACE (by Mr Kipling)

Mowgli's Brothers [part one]

Kaa's Hunting

How Fear Came

Mowgli's Brothers [part two]

'Tiger! Tiger!'

Letting in the Jungle

The King's Ankus

Red Dog

The Spring Running

In the Rukh (from Many Inventions)

Notes

PREFATORY ESSAYS

A note upon the text

Mr Wemyss and Mr Pyle, as editors and annotators of this edition, have collated all the stories in which Mowgli appears, in their internal chronological order rather than in their chronological order of publication, with their epigraphs, but without their other verses. Where appropriate, resort has been made to the Sussex Edition as authoritative where editions vary.

It is perhaps as well to note that the first syllable of 'Mowgli' is called, in Britain (as it was by Kipling), to rhyme with 'cow'; Americans commonly pronounce it to rhyme with 'foe'. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Those familiar with the techniques employed in the authors' The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, for Children and Sensible Adults), will be familiar with the methods employed herein. It is their purpose, as not-inexperienced historians, to make familiar to a new generation all the things that were understood as a matter of course by the Victorian and Edwardian reader – and some that weren't.

GMW WEMYSS

nr Wylye, Warminster, Wilts

September 2011 / November 2012

MARKHAM SHAW PYLE

Houston (that's by-God Texas, neighbour, not Renfrewshire)

September 2011 / November 2012

Kipling and the Kaiser

The Lesser Breeds without the Law…. The Jungle Book was published in 1894; The Second Jungle Book, one year later, in the year of Wilde's conviction for sodomy.

Mr Gladstone gave way to Lord Rosebery at Downing Street. The Kaiser, having 'dropped the pilot' Bismarck in 1890, began the year 1894 with Graf von Caprivi as his Imperial Chancellor, and ended it with the Prince of Hohenlohe in that office, he whose aunt was Queen Victoria's half-sister. Both Chancellors were liberal by instinct, in favour of free trade, rapprochement with Britain, and a reconciliation of the parties to the Kulturkampf. Both were also rendered helpless to effect their hopes and policies; the Anglo-German Agreement or Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890, consule von Caprivi, had been the last expiring gasp of any hopes of accommodation between the British and German Empires. It had been on von Caprivi's watch also, captive upon the bridge, that the German jingoes had allowed the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia to expire, leading to the 1894 alliance between Russia and the French Republic that left Germany exposed to a future two-front war.

It was a time of anarchy, assassination, and anti-Semitism: the year of the assassination of Sadi Carnot and of the Dreyfus Affair. It was the year of the accession of Nicholas 2d to the throne of all the Russias.

A year after the publication of The Second Jungle Book, that is, in 1895, Joe Chamberlain entered Cabinet as Colonial Secretary. France was the Old Enemy, and, as Bismarck had intended, Britain's new enemy in colonial and imperial expansion (the Fashoda Incident of 1898 was already implicit in their rivalry); Russia was the enemy in the Great Game and the race for control of Central Asia, with all that that implied for the security of British India.

Joe Chamberlain – like, fatally, his second son Neville¹ after him – was set upon striking hands with Germany. In this as in all else he had the politician's gift of capturing, incarnating, following, and pretending to lead, popular sentiment, or a very large strain therein.

Kipling would have none of it. Certainly the son of the Raj held Russia – 'the Bear that walks like a Man' – to be the enemy of British India; he did not however therefore embrace Germany – least of all the noisy Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm, that was bent upon building Tirpitz' navy and the Kiel Canal – as a friend and ally. A tribalist rather than a racialist or indeed a nationalist – see 'Mothers' sons and motherlands' in this volume – Kipling had no use for the Aryan master race fantasies of Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.² There is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth. In 1890, Kipling had thrown back in the face of the Kaiser 'An Imperial Rescript': to the seductive prospect of 'The road to the rest ye seek: The strong shall wait for the weary, the hale shall halt for the weak; With the even tramp of an army where no man breaks from the line, Ye shall march to peace and plenty in the bond of brotherhood – sign!', his characters had replied, that they worked for the kids and the missus, 'and, W. Hohenzollern, I guess I shall work till I drop'. It was one thing, and bad enough, for 'The Islanders' to fawn upon the Younger Nations of the Empire for 'the men who could shoot and ride'; but paying Danegeld was simply not on. Kipling in 1891 had had his Hans Breitmann explicitly compare the coral snake that killed his fellow German and fellow naturalist to the German flag.

Kim, in which the Eurasians, Indians, and Tibetans, and the sahibs who immerse themselves in Indian culture – Strickland, Creighton, Kim himself – are the heroes, and the European rivals of the Empire are the villains, dates from 1901, the year in which the Queen-Empress died. The Jubilee Year of 1897 had seen the publication of Kipling's poem, 'Recessional', a stark, stern note in counterpoint to the easy alleluias, and the first appearance of the phrase, the 'lesser breeds without the Law': the 'Gentiles' whose trust is in military power alone. The Bandar-log date to the 1894 publication of The Jungle Book.

Two years before, Tirpitz had become Chief of the German Imperials Naval Staff. From 1897 – that Recessional year: 'far-called our navies melt away, on dune and headland sinks the fire' – Tirpitz was State Secretary of the German Imperial Naval Office, and it was his task as it was his pleasure to carry out Wilhelm's intention to challenge the Royal Navy.

Kipling wrote as much of the sea and sailors, civilian and RN, as he did of the British Army; and he was one of many British subjects who had, from at least 1884 and the German scramble for colonies (the first, ominously, was in New Guinea, a threat to Australia and to the British dominance East of Suez), regarded Germany as a potential enemy. The Russians were a danger to the Raj, sharing a land border in their Central Asian expansion; a Germany that acquired colonies and necessarily wanted a fleet to connect and protect them, was potentially an enemy greater yet. And Germany's record: over Schleswig-Holstein; against Austria; against France: was an ugly one. They were a people outside the Law and not to be trusted, human-like yet not fully human; and so they appear in Kipling, bombastic, blustering, bullying: Bandar-log.

In fact, even if one doesn't take Bronckhorst of the divorce case as making one, and assesses Breitmann as neutral in his morals – which were a mistake – there is hardly a 'good German' in Kipling, twenty years and more before the Great War: for further exploration of which see the essay 'Mothers' sons and motherlands' in this volume.

By contrast, Kipling – whose Mother Lodge was racially, culturally, and creedally integrated, whose Mother City was Bombay (Mumbai), and whose Mother Tongue was not English (an experience he shares, revealingly, with Joseph Conrad) – was not at all ill-disposed towards the peoples of India. He did not, of course, regard them as standing on the same plane as the British (in India, although possibly on the same plane as the Home lower classes); he counted them as being more or less equivalent to Americans and the Irish.

This is not a facetious observation. It is a central conceit of Kim – that Old Harrovian 'Joe' Nehru's favourite novel, one observes – that the Irish and the Indian are brothers under the skin. Sir William Jones had after all discovered the common roots of the Indo-European languages whilst in Calcutta; Hurree Babu is an ethnologist; and it was a common myth that any person in India, if you hummed a few bars of an Irish song, could complete it without ever having heard it before. And if Mulvaney, M'Turk and Colonel Dabney alike as Anglo-Irishmen, and the Boheens, the Mavericks, and the Black Tyrones, do not suffice to show the regard, the mingled fondness and exasperation, that Kipling held for the Irish, nothing can. Equally, Sir Purun Dass, KCIE, is unquestionably a hero and a natural nobleman, superior to most if not all of the British characters in all of Kipling. Mahbub Ali, Hurree Babu, Ditta Mul, Rutton Singh, and half a hundred others, like the great lama himself, Teshoo, are no worse and often better men than the Irish and indeed the British of the Raj, even as Campbell, Sefton, Nafferton, King, Tulke, Pagett MP, Mrs Vansuythen, Tarrion, and almost every British woman at Simla save perhaps Mrs Hauksbee, are morally and intellectually much inferior. The Indians, like the Irish, are celebrated by the laureate of the Raj. It is the Germans, and to an extent the Russians and the French, who fare worst.

And therefore it is, O Best Belovèd, that the belief, that the Bandar-log represent the Germans and other 'white' foreigners, and not the native peoples of the Empire whom Kipling often celebrated, rings sound.

Mr Pyle on dry-land farming and ranching

Wemyssie – although he's pilfered a surname from the Scots side of the family for his pen-name – hails mostly from my own distantly-ancestral Wiltshire. (Yep, we're about umpteenth cousins mumble-times removed. It happens. There were two Winston Churchills publishing at the same time, after all.)

Land matters, and the land that shapes you matters, and the land that matters to you shapes you and what you know and what and how you write; in GW's case, that's Wilts. All chalk and cheese. We have land like that in America, too: the Shenandoah Valley, for one. Supports an animal unit per acre, or more, sometimes, land like that (one cow with calf makes an animal unit).

So Cousin Wemyss is not precisely the one to talk about the sort of land the villagers roundabout Seoni have.

I am. Texas has a heck of a lot of dryland habitat. Of course, big as it is, Texas has a heck of a lot of dang near anything.

Farming – arable rather than pasture: the ploughed lands – began in river-bottoms, notably the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia, where regular floods naturally manured the earth and irrigated the crops; the paddies of the Orient are an early extension of such techniques. But farmers in the Near East and in India very early on developed controlled irrigation, and fertilisation, to allow the raising of crops away from the banks of a river, and carefully, slowly, unscientifically in the modern sense but by the accretion of generations' worth of wisdom, bred crops apt to such soils and sites, and breeds of livestock capable of grazing on unirrigated pasture. (It was only in Charles 1st's times that mediæval techniques of penning herds for dunging the soil fully gave way to the creation and use of water-meadows in the West of England, where the soil is enriched and kept from freezing in winter by running a shallow, slow-moving sheet of nutrient-rich water over it, all through the cold months: the Western World has not always led in technology, you know.) These were lessons that had to be relearnt or independently stumbled on by frontier Americans 'West of Ninety' – that being about the longitude at which, certainly in Texas and all through the Plains, rainfall totals drop off from Eastern, European-style wetness and the prairies and the West begin. The Indians never had a Dust Bowl, which tells you a right smart about their stewardship of the land.

The villagers of India, with their accumulated generations'-worth of land-wisdom, their planting sense and irrigation methods – look at 'Letting in the Jungle' – weren't and aren't exactly 'lo-the-poor-Indian'. They knew what they were doing when it came to ploughing (I just know GW's going to change what I wrote to the UK spelling) and grazing, in a landscape no Englishman – note that I don't say no Welshman, or no Scot – could grasp. And they knew this because they understood the land they lived on. Their poverty and their inability to prosper was the result of bad governance and bad economic governance, and one reason India now prospers as a large and valued part of the Anglosphere is that, whatever else the Brits did – and they did plenty, a right smart of it bad – they left behind better law and governance, and democracy.

The fault wasn't in the land, or the cultivators. Anybody who thinks that the Indian villager didn't know split beans from coffee about cattle hasn't considered the convergent evolution of the Longhorn towards similarity with Bos indicus, during its feral period, from dryland stock from dusty Murcia, Andalusia, and Estremadura; or why it is that a right smart of Kings and Klebergs spent a right smart of money creating the Santa Gertrudis breed of cattle.

Which brings us to the next point.

Houston is at 29 North. Corpus Christi is at 27 North. Brownsville is at 25 North.

Seoni is at 22 North.

Madhya Pradesh isn't tropical, it's subtropical. That's why the village Mowgli let the jungle in on had irrigation channels. Its average yearly rainfall is just shy of 54 inches. Houston gets 49 inches. The forests of Madhya Pradesh are not the lush, tropical rainforests that the term 'jungle' nowadays evokes: they are more like the brasada, the scrub, of South Texas. Except a mite wetter than the South Texas Brush Country. Point being, it ain't the Amazon, neighbour. It's gullied, grassy, open in a good bit of it, with a fairly uncluttered understory: a subtropical mixed forest. The 'amiable canvas of the douanier Rousseau' that's on the cover of this book must not be allowed to mislead you. (Neither Gervie nor I can remember whose line about Rousseau that was; we think it may have been Kenneth Clark's).

So as you picture these scenes in Kipling's work, remember that it's a scene of mixed forest, glades and meadows, lakes and little villages: not the Big Thicket or something impenetrable to be hacked through by Intrepid Explorers (preferably Groucho as Captain Spaulding).

Mothers' sons and motherlands

Both of the editors have now outlived, shortly before reaching the age of fifty, their respective sets of parents. Most recently, Mr Pyle's mother has died.

Mothers and motherhood: the figure of the Mother – the Little Mother – is iconic in Kipling. Bombay was

Mother of Cities to me,

For I was born in her gate,

Between the palms and the sea,

Where the world-end steamers wait.

Messua and Mother Wolf, Raksha, are the poles of Mowgli's divided allegiance, to Mankind and to the Pack (and both, it may be added, are a damned sight more sensible than the males of their acquaintance, in the same sense in which one finds that the Blessed Virgin and Mary Magdalene are streets ahead of the ineffective, cowardly, Christ-denying, running-away, quarrelling, impractical Apostles, at least prior to the latter lot's Whitsun transformation).

Kipling of course had no use for Mother Church, but he significantly used the maternal image for Freemasonry: 'The Mother Lodge' elaborates this – and his letter to The Times of 16 January 1925, as well as references in Something of Myself, does as well. 'In reply to your letter[,] I was secretary for some years of Lodge Hope and Perseverance, No. 782, EC (Lahore, English Constitution)…'.

Mothers – distant presences even for day-boys – matter immensely to Stalky and his Company, and to the men they later become, Slaves of the Lamp as they were, on Home Leave. Won-tolla the Outlier fights for the shades of his cubs and his wife, slaughtered by the dhole. As was true of almost all Anglo-Indian (in the then sense of the term) children, Kipling had been separated from his parents and sent to England – the Mother Country – in his youth. For him as for Tods and many another of his characters, in especial Kim, India was his child-heart's home, and English was not his mother tongue. As Tods, in 'Tods' Amendment', 'must fink in English', and 'translat[e] in his mind from the vernacular to English, as many Anglo-Indian children do', so had it been for the young Kipling also. 'In the afternoon heats before we took our sleep, [the ayah] or Meeta would tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution Speak English now to Papa and Mamma. So one spoke English, haltingly translated out of the vernacular idiom that one thought and dreamed in. The Mother sang wonderful songs at a black piano and would go out to Big Dinners.'

If the Mother Country exerted only an ambiguous claim upon Kipling's filial loyalties: 'what should they know of England who only England know?'; 'ye contented your souls / With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals': it was in no small part because Bombay was Mother of Cities to him, and in no small part because it was in India that his own Mother remained whilst he suffered and was abused and began to lose his sight in English care.

Like Churchill, Kipling could not bear to and simply refused to blame his parents for his childhood misfortunes and mistreatment: and 'the Mother' was to him as the much less worthy Lady Randolph was to young Winston, the Evening Star, loved dearly – but at a distance. For Churchill, the distance was emotional (on his mother's side, not by any choice of his); for Kipling, literal and spatial. Mrs Lockwood Kipling, Alice MacDonald as was, was appalled by the mistreatment her children had suffered as boarders with the Holloways, and Took Steps; the former Jenny Jerome left Winston to the care of worthy Mrs Everest, who was in most respects Churchill's true mother in all but blood.

Alice (Mrs Lockwood) Kipling was, in any case, a much better and more interesting person than the duke of Marlborough's American-born daughter-in-law (and she, if not virtuous, was interesting enough in her own right). The former Alice MacDonald was one of four celebrated sisters – as celebrated in their day and in their fashion as those Souls the Wyndham Sisters or those hons and rebels the Mitford girls – who married men almost as celebrated … and commonly bore more celebrated children yet. Georgina married the Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones; Agnes married the president of the Royal Academy, Sir Edward Poynter; Louisa, the only one of them not to marry an artist, married a Warwickshire ironmaster and Tory MP, Alfred Baldwin, whose son Stanley became, disastrously, Prime Minister; and Alice, of course, married Lockwood Kipling and became Rudyard's mother, acquiring also the character expressed by a Viceroy, that dullness and she could not exist in the same room.

It is little wonder that the figure of the Mother, the Little Mother, so saturates Kipling's works.

Yet the figure of the Mother Country, incarnate perhaps in the Widow of Windsor, also overshadows his works: and that relationship is more equivocal. The Mother Country is, after all, the Mother Hive, foolishly open, lazy, Danegeld-paying, the midden on which such as Pagett MP crowed. It is fatally easy to look back upon Kipling as a racist or racialist, an imperialist tout court, a jingo and a xenophobe. It is also facile and superficial so to do. He is immensely ambivalent about the Mother Country, be it England as such or Britain's Empire or the avatars thereof such as the Seeonee Wolf Pack, the Free People. Hand in hand with his distaste for organised religion – in the rukh he is, like Muller, at least half Pagan – is his wholehearted Freemasonry. East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet – and yet there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth. The Lesser Breeds Without the Law are not lawless because they are lesser, but lesser because they are lawless. Consider that 1925 letter to The Times, even if the facts are improved by an old man's memory: 'I was secretary for some years of Lodge Hope and Perseverance, No. 782, EC (Lahore, English Constitution), which included Brethren of at least four creeds. I was entered by a member of the Brahmo Samaj (a Hindu), passed by a Mahomedan, and raised by an Englishman. Our Tyler was an Indian Jew. We met, of course, on the level, and the only difference that anyone would notice was that at our banquets some of the Brethren, who were debarred by caste rules from eating food not ceremonially prepared, sat over empty plates. I had the good fortune to be able to arrange a series of informal lectures by Brethren of various faiths, on the baptismal ceremonies of their religions.' In Something of Myself, he elaborates – in both senses, with resort to the privileged memory of an elderly writer – saying, 'In '85 I was made a Freemason by dispensation (Lodge Hope and Perseverance 782 E.C.), being under age, because the Lodge hoped for a good Secretary. They did not get