Tales from India

By Rudyard Kipling and GP Editors

Tales from India presents the very best of Kipling's short stories. His vignettes of life in British India give vivid insights into Anglo-India at work and play, and into the character of the Indians themselves. Witty, wry, sometimes cynical, these tales with their brevity and concentration of effect are landmarks in the his

• Language: English
• Publisher: GENERAL PRESS
• Release date: Jun 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9789387669840

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was an English author and poet who began writing in India and shortly found his work celebrated in England. An extravagantly popular, but critically polarizing, figure even in his own lifetime, the author wrote several books for adults and children that have become classics, Kim, The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, Captains Courageous and others. Although taken to task by some critics for his frequently imperialistic stance, the author’s best work rises above his era’s politics. Kipling refused offers of both knighthood and the position of Poet Laureate, but was the first English author to receive the Nobel prize.

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Contents

Rudyard Kipling

Chapter 1

The Story of Muhammad Din

Chapter 2

In the House of Suddhoo

Chapter 3

Without Benefit of Clergy

Chapter 4

On Greenhow Hill

Chapter 5

‘The Finest Story in the World’

Chapter 6

The Miracle of Purun Bhagat

Chapter 7

The Bridge-Builders

Chapter 8

The Cat that Walked by Himself

Chapter 9

‘They’

Chapter 10

The House Surgeon

Chapter 11

The Tree of Justice

Chapter 12

Friendly Brook

Chapter 13

Mary Postgate

Chapter 14

The Bull that Thought

Chapter 15

The Wish House

Chapter 16

The Gardener

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), a leading English short-story writer, poet, and novelist was born in Bombay, India, on December 30, 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, had come to Bombay after being appointed to a teaching post at a Bombay school of art. Indian servants took care of Rudyard and taught him the Hindi language of India. He is best known for his stories about India during the late 1800’s, when India was a British colony. Kipling wrote more than 300 short stories, which illustrate a wide variety of narrative techniques. He also wrote children’s stories that became popular worldwide. In 1907, Kipling was the first English writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature.

When he was five-years old, his parents brought him to Southsea, England, near Portsmouth. At the age of 12, Kipling was enrolled at the United Services College, a school established to educate inexpensively the sons of Army officers. Kipling, an eager reader, was made editor of the school journal. Limited family finances prevented Kipling from going to a university. In 1882, he returned to India instead and joined the staff of the Civil and Military Gazette, a newspaper in the northwestern city of Lahore. He learned much about life in the region by reporting on local events. By 1886, his feature articles and stories had many readers. The newspaper also printed some of his poems, later collected in Departmental Ditties (1886) and enlarged in later editions. In 1887, Kipling joined the staff of the Pioneer, a newspaper in Allahabad. He wrote articles based on his travels in northern India. Many were later collected in From Sea to Sea (1899).

Kipling’s first book of fiction, Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), consists of 40 stories, 32 of them originally written for the Civil and Military Gazette. Stories for the Pioneer soon were collected in six paperback books in the Indian Railway Library series. These books, sold at railway stations, were popular with travellers and spread Kipling’s fame outside India. Kipling returned to England in 1889. His first novel, The Light that Failed, was also published in 1890. The novel received mixed reviews, but Kipling by this time was the most talked about writer in both England and the United States. Life’s Handicap (1891) is another collection of short stories.

Kipling wrote, The Jungle Book in 1894 and The Second Jungle Book in 1895, children’s stories that gained a wide international audience. These stories describe the adventures of Mowgli, an Indian child who gets lost in the jungle and is brought up by a family of wolves. Kipling returned to the subject of India in his finest novel, Kim (1900). The story tells of an Irish orphan who adopts early and completely to Indian ways. The novel became a classic because of its rich rendering of the multiple cultures of India. It offers portraits of unforgettable characters—especially native Indians. Another book of children’s stories, the Just So Stories, appeared in 1902. It gives humorous explanations of such questions as how the leopard got its spots and how the elephant got its trunk. Kipling reviewed English history for children in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910).

Kipling’s later works reveal a darkened view of the world. His daughter, Josephine, died of pneumonia in 1899, and his son, John, died in 1915 in the Battle of Loos during World War I. In addition, Kipling’s concerns about his own health coloured the fiction of his later years. He suffered from a bleeding ulcer for years before it was finally diagnosed in 1933. Kipling’s last three volumes of short stories, A Diversity of Creatures (1917), Debits and Credits (1926), and Limits and Renewals (1932), stress the realities of pain and death. An unfinished autobiography, Something of Myself, was published in 1937, after his death.

Chapter 1

The Story of Muhammad Din

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Who is the happy man? He that sees in his own house at home, little children crowned with dust, leaping and falling and crying.

—Munichandra,

Translated by Professor Peterson.

The polo-ball was an old one, scarred, chipped, and dinted. It stood on the mantelpiece among the pipe-stems which Imam Din, khidmatgar, was cleaning for me.

Does the Heaven-born want this ball? said Imam Din deferentially.

The Heaven-born set no particular store by it; but of what use was a polo-ball to a khidmatgar?

By Your Honour’s favour, I have a little son. He has seen this ball and desires it to play with. I do not want it for myself.

No one would for an instant accuse portly old Imam Din of wanting to play with polo-balls. He carried out the battered thing into the verandah and there followed a hurricane of joyful squeaks, a patter of small feet, and the thud-thud-thud of the ball rolling along the ground. Evidently the little son had been waiting outside the door to secure his treasure. But how had he managed to see that polo-ball?

Next day, coming back from office half an hour earlier than usual, I was aware of a small figure in the dining-room—a tiny, plump figure in a ridiculously inadequate shirt which came, perhaps, halfway down the tubby stomach. It wandered around the room, thumb in mouth, crooning to itself as it took stock of the pictures. Undoubtedly this was the little son.

He had no business in my room, of course; but was so deeply absorbed in his discoveries that he never noticed me in the doorway. I stepped into the room and startled him nearly into a fit. He sat down on the ground with a gasp. His eyes opened and his mouth followed suit. I knew what was coming, and fled, followed by a long, dry howl which reached the servants’ quarters far more quickly than any command of mine had ever done. In ten seconds Imam Din was in the dining-room. Then despairing sobs arose, and I returned to find Imam Din admonishing the small sinner who was using most of his shirt as a handkerchief.

This boy, said Imam Din judicially, "is a budmash—a big budmash. He will, without doubt, go to the jail-khana for his behaviour." Renewed yells from the penitent, and an elaborate apology to myself from Imam Din.

Tell the baby, said I, "that the Sahib is not angry, and take him away. Imam Din conveyed my forgiveness to the offender, who had now gathered all his shirt round his neck, stringwise, and the yell subsided into a sob. The two set off for the door. His name, said Imam Din, as though the name were part of the crime, is Muhammad Din, and he is a budmash. Freed from present danger, Muhammad Din turned round in his father’s arms, and said gravely, It is true that my name is Muhammad Din, tahib, but I am not a budmash. I am a man!"

From that day dated my acquaintance with Muhammad Din. Never again did he come into my dining-room, but on the neutral ground of the garden we greeted each other with much state, though our conversation was confined to "Talaam, tahib from his side, and Salaam, Muhammad Din" from mine. Daily on my return from office, the little white shirt and the fat little body used to rise from the shade of the creeper-covered trellis where they had been hid; and daily I checked my horse here, that my salutation might not be slurred over or given unseemly.

Muhammad Din never had any companions. He used to trot about the compound, in and out of the castor-oil bushes, on mysterious errands of his own. One day I stumbled upon some of his handiwork far down the grounds. He had half buried the polo-ball in dust, and stuck six shrivelled old marigold flowers in a circle round it. Outside that circle again was a rude square, traced out in bits of red brick alternating with fragments of broken china; the whole bounded by a little bank of dust. The water-man from the well-curb put in a plea for the small architect, saying that it was only the play of a baby and did not much disfigure my garden.

Heaven knows that I had no intention of touching the child’s work then or later; but, that evening, a stroll through the garden brought me unawares full on it; so that I trampled, before I knew, marigold-heads, dust-bank, and fragments of broken soap-dish into confusion, past all hope of mending. Next morning, I came upon Muhammad Din crying softly to himself over the ruin I had wrought. Someone had cruelly told him that the sahib was very angry with him for spoiling the garden, and had scattered his rubbish, using bad language the while. Muhammad Din laboured for an hour at effacing every trace of the dustbank and pottery fragments, and it was with a tearful and apologetic face that he said, "Talaam tahib," when I came home from office. A hasty inquiry resulted in Imam Din informing Muhammad Din that, by my singular favour, he was permitted to disport himself as he pleased. Whereat the child took heart and fell to tracing the ground-plan of an edifice which was to eclipse the marigold-poloball creation.

For some months the chubby little eccentricity revolved in his humble orbit among the castor-oil bushes and in the dust; always fashioning magnificent palaces from stale flowers thrown away by the bearer, smooth water-worn pebbles, bits of broken glass, and feathers pulled, I fancy, from my fowls—always alone, and always crooning to himself.

A gaily-spotted sea-shell was dropped one day close to the last of his little buildings; and I looked that Muhammad Din should build something more than ordinarily splendid on the strength of it. Nor was I disappointed. He meditated for the better part of an hour, and his crooning rose to a jubilant song. Then he began tracing in the dust. It would certainly be a wondrous palace, this one, for it was two yards long and a yard broad in ground-plan. But the palace was never completed.

Next day there was no Muhammad Din at the head of the carriage-drive, and no "Talaam, tahib" to welcome my return. I had grown accustomed to the greeting, and its omission troubled me. Next day Imam Din told me that the child was suffering slightly from fever and needed quinine. He got the medicine, and an English doctor.

They have no stamina, these brats, said the doctor, as he left Imam Din’s quarters.

A week later, though I would have given much to have avoided it, I met on the road to the Musalman burying-ground Imam Din, accompanied by one other friend, carrying in his arms, wrapped in a white cloth, all that was left of little Muhammad Din.

Chapter 2

In the House of Suddhoo

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A stone’s throw out on either hand

From that well-ordered road we tread,

And all the world is wild and strange:

Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite

Shall bear us company to-night,

For we have reached the Oldest Land

Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.

—From the Dusk to the Dawn

The house of Suddhoo, near the Taksali Gate, is two-storeyed, with four carved windows of old brown wood, and a flat roof. You may recognise it by five red hand-prints arranged like the Five of Diamonds on the whitewash between the upper windows. Bhagwan Dass the grocer and a man who says he gets his living by seal-cutting live in the lower storey with a troop of wives, servants, friends, and retainers. The two upper rooms used to be occupied by Janoo and Azizun, and a little black-and-tan terrier that was stolen from an Englishman’s house and given to Janoo by a soldier. Today, only Janoo lives in the upper rooms. Suddhoo sleeps on the roof generally, except when he sleeps in the street. He used to go to Peshawar in the cold weather to visit his son who sells curiosities near the Edwards’ Gate, and then he slept under a real mud roof. Suddhoo is a great friend of mine, because his cousin had a son who secured, thanks to my recommendation, the post of head-messenger to a big firm in the Station. Suddhoo says that God will make me a Lieutenant-Governor one of these days. I daresay his prophecy will come true. He is very, very old, with white hair and no teeth worth showing, and he has outlived his wits—outlived nearly everything except his fondness for his son at Peshawar. Janoo and Azizun are Kashmiris, Ladies of the City, and theirs was an ancient and more or less honourable profession; but Azizun has since married a medical student from the North-West and has settled down to a most respectable life somewhere near Bareilly. Bhagwan Dass is an extortionist and an adulterator. He is very rich. The man who is supposed to get his living by seal-cutting pretends to be very poor. This lets you know as much as is necessary of the four principal tenants in the house of Suddhoo. Then there is me of course; but I am only the chorus that comes in at the end to explain things. So I do not count.

Suddhoo was not clever. The man who pretended to cut seals was the cleverest of them all—Bhagwan Dass only knew how to lie—except Janoo. She was also beautiful, but that was her own affair.

Suddhoo’s son at Peshawar was attacked by pleurisy, and old Suddhoo was troubled. The seal-cutter man heard of Suddhoo’s anxiety and made capital out of it. He was abreast of the times. He got a friend in Peshawar to telegraph daily accounts of the son’s health. And here the story begins.

Suddhoo’s cousin’s son told me, one evening, that Suddhoo wanted to see me, that he was too old and feeble to come personally, and that I should be conferring an everlasting honour on the House of Suddhoo, if I went to him. I went; but I think, seeing how well off Suddhoo was then, that he might have sent something better than an ekka, which jolted fearfully, to haul out a future Lieutenant-Governor to the city on a muggy April evening. The ekka did not run quickly. It was full dark when we pulled up opposite the door of Ranjit Singh’s Tomb near the main gate of the Fort. Here was Suddhoo, and he said that by reason of my condescension, it was absolutely certain that I should become a Lieutenant-Governor while my hair was yet black. Then we talked about the weather and the state of my health, and the wheat crops, for fifteen minutes, in the Huzuri Bagh, under the stars.

Suddhoo came to the point at last. He said that Janoo had told him that there was an order of the Sirkar against magic, because it was feared that magic might one day kill the Empress of India. I didn’t know anything about the state of the law; but I fancied that something interesting was going to happen. I said that so far from magic being discouraged by the Government it was highly commended. The greatest officials of the State practised it themselves. (If the financial statement isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.) Then, to encourage him further, I said that, if there was any jadoo afoot, I had not the least objection to giving it my countenance and sanction, and to seeing that it was clean jadoo—white magic, as distinguished from the unclean jadoo which kills folk. It took a long time before Suddhoo admitted that this was just what he had asked me to come for. Then he told me, in jerks and quavers, that the man who said he cut seals was a sorcerer of the cleanest kind; that every day he gave Suddhoo news of the sick son in Peshawar more quickly than the lightning could fly, and that this news was always corroborated by the letters. Further, that he had told Suddhoo how a great danger was threatening his son, which could be removed by clean jadoo; and, of course, heavy payment. I began to see exactly how the land lay, and told Suddhoo that I also understood a little jadoo in the Western line, and would go to his house to see that everything was done decently and in order. We set off together; and on the way Suddhoo told me that he had paid the seal-cutter between one hundred and two hundred rupees already; and the jadoo of that night would cost two hundred more. Which was cheap, he said, considering the greatness of his son’s danger; but I do not think he meant it.

The lights were all cloaked in the front of the house when we arrived. I could hear awful noises from behind the seal-cutter’s shop-front, as if someone were groaning his soul out. Suddhoo shook all over, and while we groped our way upstairs, he told me that the jadoo had begun. Janoo and Azizun met us at the stair-head, and told us that the jadoo-work was coming off in their rooms, because there was more space there. Janoo is a lady of a free-thinking turn of mind. She whispered that the jadoo was an invention to get money out of Suddhoo, and that the seal-cutter would go to a hot place when he died. Suddhoo was nearly crying with fear and old age. He kept walking up and down the room in the half-light, repeating his son’s name over and over again, and asking Azizun if the seal-cutter ought not to make a reduction in the case of his own landlord. Janoo pulled me over to the shadow in the recess of the carved bow-windows. The boards were up, and the rooms were only lit by one tiny oil-lamp. There was no chance of my being seen if I stayed still.

Presently, the groans below ceased, and we heard steps on the staircase. That was the seal-cutter. He stopped outside the door as the terrier barked and Azizun fumbled at the chain, and he told Suddhoo to blow out the lamp. This left the place in jet darkness, except for the red glow from the two huqas that belonged to Janoo and Azizun. The seal-cutter came in, and I heard Suddhoo throw himself down on the floor and groan. Azizun caught her breath, and Janoo backed on to one of the beds with a shudder. There was a clink of something metallic, and then shot up a pale bluegreen flame near the ground. The light was just enough to show Azizun, pressed against one corner of the room with the terrier between her knees; Janoo, with her hands clasped, leaning forward as she sat on the bed; Suddhoo, face down, quivering, and the seal-cutter.

I hope I may never see another man like that seal-cutter. He was stripped to the waist, with a wreath of white jasmine as thick as my wrist round his forehead, a salmon coloured loin-cloth round his middle, and a steel bangle on each ankle. This was not awe-inspiring. It was the face of the man that turned me cold. It was blue-grey in the first place. In the second, the eyes were rolled back till you could only see the whites of them; and, in the third, the face was the face of a demon—a ghoul—anything you please, except of the sleek, oily old ruffian who sat in the daytime over his turning-lathe downstairs. He was lying on his stomach with his arms turned and crossed behind him, as if he had been thrown down pinioned. His head and neck were the only parts of him off the floor. They were nearly at right angles to the body, like the head of a cobra at spring. It was ghastly. In the centre of the room, on the bare earth floor, stood a big, deep, brass basin, with a pale blue-green light floating in the centre like a night-light. Round that basin the man on the floor wriggled himself three times. How he did it I do not know. I could see the muscles ripple along his spine and fall smooth again; but I could not see any other motion. The head seemed the only thing alive about him, except that slow curl and uncurl of the labouring back-muscles. Janoo from the bed was breathing seventy to the minute; Azizun held her hands before her eyes; and old Suddhoo, fingering at the dirt that had got into his white beard, was crying to himself. The horror of it was that the creeping, crawly thing made no sound—only crawled! And, remember, this lasted for ten minutes, while the terrier whined, and Azizun shuddered, and Janoo gasped, and Suddhoo cried.

I felt the hair lift at the back of my head, and my heart thump like a thermantidote paddle. Luckily, the seal-cutter betrayed himself by his most impressive trick and made me calm again. After he had finished that unspeakable triple crawl, he stretched his head away from the floor as high as he could, and sent out a jet of fire from his nostrils. Now I knew how fire-spouting is done—I can do it myself—so I felt at ease. The business was a fraud. If he had only kept to that crawl without trying to raise the effect, goodness knows what I might not have thought. Both the girls shrieked at the jet of fire and the head dropped, chin-down on the floor, with a thud; the whole body lying there like a corpse with its arms trussed. There was a pause of five full minutes after this; the blue-green flame died down. Janoo stooped to settle one of her anklets, while Azizun turned her face to the wall and took the terrier in her arms. Suddhoo put out an arm mechanically to Janoo’s huqa, and she slid it across the floor with her foot. Directly above the body and on the wall were a couple of flaming portraits, in stamped-paper frames, of the Queen and the Prince of Wales. They looked down on the performance, and to my thinking, seemed to heighten the grotesqueness of it all.

Just when the silence was getting unendurable, the body turned over and rolled away from the basin to the side of the room, where it lay stomach-up. There was a faint plop from the basin—exactly like the noise a fish makes when it takes a fly—and the green light in the centre revived.

I looked at the basin, and saw, bobbing in the water, the dried, shrivelled, black head of a native baby—open eyes, open mouth, and shaved scalp. It was worse, being so very sudden, than the crawling exhibition. We had no time to say anything before it began to speak.

Read Poe’s account of the voice that came from the mesmerised dying man, and you will realise less than one-half of the horror of that head’s voice.

There was an interval of a second or two between each word, and a sort of ring, ring, ring, in the note of the voice, like the timbre of a bell. It pealed slowly, as if talking to itself, for several minutes before I got rid of my cold sweat. Then the blessed solution struck me. I looked at the body lying near the doorway, and saw, just where the hollow of the throat joins on the shoulders, a muscle that had nothing to do with any man’s regular breathing twitching away steadily. The whole thing was a careful reproduction of the Egyptian teraphim that one reads about sometimes; and the voice was as clever and as appalling a piece of ventriloquism as one could wish to hear. All this time the head was lip-lip-lapping against the side of the basin, and speaking. It told Suddhoo, on his face again whining, of his son’s illness and of the state of the illness up to the evening of that very night. I always shall respect the seal-cutter for keeping so faithfully to the time of the Peshawar telegrams. It went on to say that skilled doctors were night and day watching over the man’s life; and that he would eventually recover if the fee to the potent sorcerer, whose servant was the head in the basin, were doubled.

Here the mistake from the artistic point of view came in. To ask for twice your stipulated fee in a voice that Lazarus might have used when he rose from the dead, is absurd. Janoo, who is really a woman of masculine intellect, saw this as quickly as I did. I heard her say "Asli nahin! Fareib!" scornfully under her breath; and just as she said so, the light in the basin died out, the head stopped talking, and we heard the room door creak on its hinges. Then Janoo struck a match, lit the lamp, and we saw that head, basin, and seal-cutter were gone. Suddhoo was wringing his hands, and explaining to anyone who cared to listen, that, if his chances of eternal salvation depended on it, he could not raise another two hundred rupees. Azizun was nearly in hysterics in the corner; while Janoo sat down composedly on one of the beds to discuss the probabilities of the whole thing being a bunao, or makeup.

I explained as much as I knew of the seal cutter’s way of jadoo; but her argument was much more simple—The magic that is always demanding gifts is no true magic, said she. "My mother told me that the only potent love-spells are those which are told to you for love. This seal-cutter man is a liar and a devil. I dare not tell, do anything, or get anything done, because I am in debt to Bhagwan Dass the bunnia for two gold rings and a heavy anklet. I must get my food from his shop. The seal-cutter is the friend of Bhagwan Dass, and he would poison my food. A fool’s jadoo has been going on for ten days, and has cost Suddhoo many rupees each night. The seal-cutter used black hens and lemons and mantras before. He never showed us anything like this till to-night. Azizun is a fool, and will be a purdahnashin soon. Suddhoo has lost his strength and his wits. See now! I had hoped to get from Suddhoo many rupees while he lived, and many more after his death; and behold, he is spending everything on that offspring of a devil and a she-ass, the seal-cutter!"

Here I said, But what induced Suddhoo to drag me into the business? Of course I can speak to the seal-cutter, and he shall refund. The whole thing is child’s talk—shame—and senseless.

Suddhoo is an old child, said Janoo. "He has lived on the roofs these seventy years and is as senseless as a milch-goat. He brought you here to assure himself that he was not breaking any law of the Sirkar, whose salt he ate many years ago. He worships the dust off the feet of the seal-cutter, and that cow-devourer has forbidden him to go and see his son. What does Suddhoo know of your laws or the lightning post? I have to watch his money going day by day to that lying beast below."

Janoo stamped her foot on the floor and nearly cried with vexation; while Suddhoo was whimpering under a blanket in the corner, and Azizun was trying to guide the pipe-stem to his foolish old mouth.

Now, the case stands thus. Unthinkingly, I have laid myself open to the charge of aiding and abetting the seal-cutter in obtaining money under false pretences, which is forbidden by Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code. I am helpless in the matter for these reasons. I cannot inform the Police. What witnesses would support my statements? Janoo refuses flatly, and Azizun is a veiled woman somewhere near Bareilly—lost in this big India of ours. I dare not again take the law into my own hands, and speak to the seal-cutter; for certain am I that, not only would Suddhoo disbelieve me, but this step would end in the poisoning of Janoo, who is bound hand and foot by her debt to the bunnia. Suddhoo is an old dotard; and whenever we meet mumbles my idiotic joke that the Sirkar rather patronises the Black Art than otherwise. His son is well now; but Suddhoo is completely under the influence of the seal-cutter, by whose advice he regulates the affairs of his life. Janoo watches daily the money that she hoped to wheedle out of Suddhoo taken by the seal-cutter, and becomes daily more furious and sullen.

She will never tell, because she dare not; but, unless something happens to prevent her, I am afraid that the seal-cutter will die of cholera—the white arsenic kind—about the middle of May. And thus I shall be privy to a murder in the House of Suddhoo.

Chapter 3

Without Benefit of Clergy

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Before my Spring I garnered Autumn’s gain,

Out of her time my field was white with grain,

The year gave up her secrets to my woe.

Forced and deflowered each sick season lay,

In mystery of increase and decay;

I saw the sunset ere men saw the day,

Who am too wise in that I should not know.

—Bitter Waters

I

But if it be a girl?

"Lord of my life, it cannot be. I have prayed for so many nights, and sent gifts to Sheikh Badlu’s shrine so often, that I know God will give us a son—a man-child that shall grow into a man. Think of this and be glad. My mother shall be his mother till I can take him again, and the mullah of the Pattan mosque shall cast his nativity—God send he be born in an auspicious hour!—and then, and then thou wilt never weary of me, thy slave."

Since when hast thou been a slave, my queen?

Since the beginning—till this mercy came to me. How could I be sure of thy love when I knew that I had been bought with silver?

Nay, that was the dowry. I paid it to thy mother.

And she has buried it, and sits upon it all day long like a hen. What talk is yours of dower! I was bought as though I had been a Lucknow dancing-girl instead of a child.

Art thou sorry for the sale?

I have sorrowed; but today I am glad. Thou wilt never cease to love me now?—answer, my king.

Never—never. No.

"Not even though the mem-log—the white women of thy own blood—love thee? And remember, I have watched them driving in the evening; they are very fair."

"I have seen fire-balloons by the hundred.