Rudyard Kipling

“ There is bravery in the early morning, when it takes great courage even to leave warm blankets, let alone walk into dirt, cold and death; on foot and on horse; empty or fed; sick or well; coolness of brain, that thinks out a plan at dawn and holds to it all through the long, murderous day; bravery of the mind that makes the jerking nerves hold still and do nothing except show a good example; sheer reckless strength that hacks through a crowd of amazed men and comes out grinning on the other side; enduring spirit that wears through a long siege, never losing heart or manners or temper ”

“ Then I slept till Strickland turned me out of the warm doolie at seven o’clock, and I stepped into all the splendour of a cool Hill day, the Plains sweltering twenty miles back and four thousand feet below. Adam waked too, and needs must ride in front of me to ask a million questions, and shout at the monkeys and clap his hands when the painted pheasants bolted across our road, and hail every woodcutter and drover and pilgrim within sight, till we halted for breakfast at a rest house. ”

“ Yet he is not a Mussulman,” said Imam Din thoughtfully.
“For the reason that he knows as much of the gods of Hindustan, and so he rides with a rein in each hand. Remember that he sat under the Baba Atal, a faquir among faquirs, for ten days; whereby a man came to be hanged for the murder of a dancing girl on the night of the great earthquake,” the Naik replied.
“True—it is true. And yet—the Sahibs are one day so wise—and another so foolish. But he has named the child well; Adam. Huzrut Adam. Ho! Ho! Father Adam we must call him.” ”

“ The rains were out, and in Bengal that means a good deal to the railways; for the rain falls for three months lavishly, till the whole country is one sea, and the snakes take refuge on the embankment, and the racing floods puff out the brick ballast from under the iron ties, and leave the rails hanging in graceful loops. Then the trains run as they can, and the permanent-way inspectors spend their nights flourishing about in hand-carts pushed by coolies over the dislocated metals, and everybody is covered with the fire-red rash of prickly heat, and loses his temper. ”

“ It was all very wonderful to Adam, but not worth much thinking over; for a child’s mind is bounded by his eyes exactly as a horse’s view of the road is limited by his blinkers. Between all these objectionable shadowy vagrants stood a ring of kind faces and strong arms, and Mata and 257Heza would never touch Adam, the first of men. Kismet might do so, because—and this was a mystery no staring into his looking-glass would solve—Kismet was written, like Police orders for the day, in or on Adam’s head. ”

“ Why does not a camel salaam like an elephant? His neck is long enough,” Adam cried.
“The Angel Jibrail made him a fool at the beginning,” said the driver, as he swayed on the top of the leading beast, and laughter ran all along the line of red-bearded men.
“That is true,” said Adam solemnly, and they laughed again.
At last, in the late afternoon, we came to Dalhousie, the loveliest of the hill-stations, and separated, Adam hardly able to be restrained from setting out at once to find Victor and the “cow’s child.” ”

“ There is very little chance of anything getting off again when once she touches in the furious Hugli current, loaded with all the fat silt of the fields of Bengal, where the soundings change two feet between tides, and new channels make and unmake themselves in one rainy season. Men have fought the Hugli for two hundred years, till now the river owns a huge building, with drawing, survey, and telegraph departments, devoted to its private service, as well as a body of wardens, who are called the Port Commissioners. ”

“ The Boy Scout is used to strangers who give him good advice on the smallest provocation; but strangers who fill you up with bacon and eggs and ginger-beer are few.
“What started it all?” the Walrus demanded.
“Well, I can’t exactly say,” William answered, and as he had never been known to give a coherent account of anything, the Walrus returned to his wires, and William lay out and dreamed in the fern among the cattle-flies. He had dismissed The Prawn altogether from his miraculously enlarging mind. ”

“ He thrust the already limp Beetle through the cartshed window. It sobered him; one cannot laugh on a bed of nettles. Then Corkran stepped on his prostrate carcass, and McTurk followed, just as Beetle would have risen; so he was upset, and the nettles painted on his cheek a likeness of hideous eruptions. ”

“ Everything in India crystallizes into a caste sooner or later—the big jute and cotton mills, the leather harness and opium factories, the coal-mines and the dockyards, and, in years to come, when India begins to be heard from as one of the manufacturing countries of the world, the labour Unions of other lands will learn something about the beauty of caste which will greatly interest them. ”

“ The right-hand window of the shed, six feet above the target, starred and cracked.
The boy who cleans the knives at the Vicarage buried his face in his hands; Jevons, the bricklayer’s assistant, tied up his bootlace; the Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society looked at the roof; the village barber whistled softly. When one is twenty-two years old, and weighs twelve-stone-eight in hard condition, one does not approve of any game that one cannot play very well. ”

“ I wish the Government would keep our service for country-born men. Those first five or six years in India give a man a pull that lasts him all his life. Adam, if only you were old enough to be my Assistant!” He looked down at the little fellow in the verandah. Adam was deeply interested in the dacoity, and, unlike a child, did not lose interest after the first week. On the contrary, he would ask his father every evening what had been done, and Strickland had drawn him a map on the white wall of the verandah, showing the different towns in which Policemen were on the look-out for thieves. ”

“ But one or two War V. C.’s of my acquaintance have told me that if you can manage the little matter of keeping your head, it is not as difficult as it sounds to get on the blind side of a machine gun, or to lie out under its lowest line of fire where, they say, you are “quite comfortable if you don’t fuss.” Also, every V. C. of the Great War I have spoken to has been rather careful to explain that he won his Cross because what he did happened to be done when and where someone could notice it. Thousands of men they said did just the same, but in places where there were no observers. ”

“ Now Strickland, the Police officer, was feared through the length and breadth of the Punjab by murderers, horse-thieves, and cattle-lifters.
Adam returned, halting outside the verandah.
“I have sent Juma away because she saw that—that which happened. Until she is gone I do not come into the house,” he said.
“But to send away thy foster-mother!” said Strickland with reproach.
“I do not send her away. It is thy blame,” and the small forefinger was pointed to Strickland. “I will not obey her. I will not eat from her hand. I will not sleep with her. Send her away!” ”

“ Presently they took on their true shape, and lurched into camp amid clouds of dust.
The Mounted Infantry escort set about its evening meal; the hot air filled with the scent of burning wood; sweating men, rough-dried sweating horses with wisps of precious forage ”

“ Marsh is my name. My son was a Scout once. Buffaloes—Hendon-way. It’s all right. Don’t you grudge an old man enjoying himself.”
The Walrus looked amazedly at William moving in three directions at once with his face on fire.
“It’s all right,” said William. “He’s giving us cooking-lessons.” Then—the words came into his mouth by themselves—“I’ll take the responsibility.”
“Yes, yes! He knew I could cook. Quite a young Sherlock he is! You carry on.” Mr. Marsh turned his back on the Walrus and despatched William again with some orders to his shop across the road. ”

“ It is rather the fashion to look down on these little wars and to call them “military promenades” and so forth, but in reality no enemy can do much more than poison your wells, rush your camp, ambuscade you, kill you with his climate, fight you body to body, make you build your own means of communication under his fire, and horribly 4cut up your wounded. ”

“ Almost any pilot will tell you that his work is much more difficult than you imagine; but the Pilots of the Hugli know that they have one hundred miles of the most dangerous river on earth running through their hands—the Hugli between Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal—and they say nothing. Their service is picked and sifted as carefully as the bench of the Supreme Court, for a judge can only hang the wrong man, or pass a bad law; but a careless pilot can lose a ten-thousand-ton ship 66with crew and cargo in less time than it takes to reverse her engines. ”

“ Heavenly sights rewarded him. The Prawn, visibly ill at ease, was shifting from one sinewy leg to the other, while an enormously fat little man with a pointed grey beard and arms like the fins of a fish investigated a couple of pots that hung on properly crutched sticks over the small fire that William had lighted in the cooking-place. He did not seem to approve of what he saw or smelt. And yet it was the impeccable Prawn’s own cookery!
“Lor!” said he at last after more sniffs of contempt, as he replaced the lid. “If you hot up things in tins, that ain’t cookery. ”

“ Let the men see a woman again!” he pleaded.
Sister Dorothy, old in the needs of war, for all her twenty-four years, gathered up a tin of biscuits and some bread and butter new cut by the orderlies. Sister Margaret picked up the tea-pot, the spirit-lamp, and a water-bottle.
“Capetown water,” she said with a nod. “Filtered too. I know Karroo water.” She jumped down lightly on to the ballast.
“What do you know about the Karroo, Sister?” said the Captain of Mounted Infantry, indulgently, as a veteran of a month’s standing. ”

“ Jim considered his chances. A junk, he knew, would draw about eleven feet and the regular fee for a qualified pilot, outward to the Sandheads, would be two hundred rupees. On the one hand he was not qualified, so he dared not ask more than half. But, on the other hand, he was fully certain of the thrashing of his life from his father for piloting without license, let alone what the Port Authorities might do to him. So he asked one hundred and seventy-five rupees, and Erh-Tze beat him down to a hundred and twenty. ”

“ The Prawn himself sought it next Spring when the Troop stole a couple of fair May days on the outskirts of a brick-field, and were very happy. But William set him aside in favour of a new and specially hopeless recruit; oily-skinned, fat, short-armed, but light on his feet, and with some notion of lifting pot-lids without wrecking or flooding the whole fire-place.
“You see, Prawn,” he explained, “cookin’ isn’t a thing one can just pick up.”
“Yes, I could—watchin’ you,” The Prawn insisted.
“No. Mr. Marsh says it’s a Gift—same as a Talent.” ”

“ He was my father.”
“Good,” said Adam, and turned on his heel without another word.
Imam Din looked after him. “An elephant breeds but once in a lifetime, but he breeds elephants. Yet, I am glad I am no father of tuskers,” said he. ”

“ The Crimea was clean fighting as far as the enemy were concerned,—for the very old men say that no one could wish for better troops than the Russians of Inkerman and Alma,—but our own War Office then, as two generations later, helped the enemy with ignorant mismanagement and neglect. In the Mutiny of 1857 all India, Bengal and the North West Provinces, seemed to be crumbling like sand-bag walls in flood, and wherever there were three or four Englishmen left, they had to kill or be killed till help came. ”

“ Very few things that the world can offer make up for having missed a place in the First Fifteen, with its black jersey and white—snow-white—knickerbockers, 303and the velvet skull-cap with the gold tassel—the cap that you leave out in the rain and accidentally step upon to make it look as old as if you had been in the First Fifteen for years. ”