A LOCOMOTIVE is, next to a marine engine, the most sensitive thing man ever made; and No. ·007, besides being sensitive, was new. The red paint was hardly dry on his spotless bumper-bar, his headlight shone like a fireman’s helmet, and his cab might have been a hardwood-finish parlour. They had run him into the round-house after his trial—he had said good-bye to his best friend in the shops, the overhead travelling-crane—the big world was just outside; and the other locos were taking stock of him. He looked at the semicircle of bold, unwinking headlights, heard the low purr and mutter of the steam mounting in the gauges—scornful hisses of contempt as a slack valve lifted a little—and would have given a month’s oil for leave to crawl through his own driving-wheels into the brick ash-pit beneath him. ·007 was an eight-wheeled ‘American’ loco, slightly different from others of his type, and as he stood he was worth ten thousand dollars on the Company’s books. But if you had bought him at his own valuation, after half an hour’s waiting in the darkish, echoing round-house, you would have saved exactly nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-eight cents. A heavy Mogul freight, with a short cowcatcher and a fire-box that came down within three inches of the rail, began the impolite game, speaking to a Pittsburgh Consolidation, who was visiting.

‘Where did this thing blow in from?’ he asked, with a dreamy puff of light steam.

‘It’s all I can do to keep track of our makes,’ was the answer, ‘without lookin’ after your back-numbers. ‘Guess it’s something Peter Cooper left over when he died.’

·007 quivered; his steam was getting up, but he held his tongue. Even a hand-car knows what sort of locomotive it was that Peter Cooper experimented upon in the far-away Thirties. It carried its coal and water in two apple-barrels, and was not much bigger than a bicycle.

Then up and spoke a small, newish switching-engine, with a little step in front of his bumper-timber, and his wheels so close together that he looked like a broncho getting ready to buck.

‘Something’s wrong with the road when a Pennsylvania gravel-pusher tells us anything about our stock, I think. That kid’s all right. Eustis designed him, and Eustis designed me. Ain’t that good enough?’

·007 could have carried the switching-loco round the yard in his tender, but he felt grateful for even this little word of consolation.

‘We don’t use hand-cars on the Pennsylvania,’ said the Consolidation. ‘That—er—peanut-stand’s old enough and ugly enough to speak for himself.’

‘He hasn’t bin spoken to yet. He’s bin spoken at. Hain’t ye any manners on the Pennsylvania?’ said the switching-loco.

‘You ought to be in the yard, Pony,’ said the Mogul, severely. ‘We’re all long-haulers here.’

‘That’s what you think,’ the little fellow replied. ‘You’ll know more ’fore the night’s out. I’ve bin down to Track 17, and the freight there—oh, Christmas!’

‘I’ve trouble enough in my own division,’ said a lean, light suburban loco with very shiny brake-shoes. My commuters wouldn’t rest till they got a parlour-car. They’ve hitched her back of all, and she hauls worse’n a snow-plough. I’ll snap her off some day sure, and then they’ll blame every one except their foolselves. They’ll be askin’ me to haul a vestibuled next!’

‘They made you in New Jersey, didn’t they?’ said Pony. ‘Thought so. Commuters and truck-waggons ain’t any sweet haulin’, but I tell you they’re a heap better’n cuttin’ out refrigerator-cars or oil-tanks. Why, I’ve hauled——’

‘Haul! You?’ said the Mogul contemptuously. ‘It’s all you can do to bunt a cold-storage car up the yard. Now, I—’ he paused a little to let the words sink in—‘I handle the Flying Freight—e-leven cars worth just anything you please to mention. On the stroke of eleven I pull out; and I’m timed for thirty-five an hour. Costly—perishable—fragile—immediate—that’s me! Suburban traffic’s only but one degree better than switching. Express freight’s what pays.’

‘Well, I ain’t given to blowing, as a rule,’ began the Pittsburgh Consolidation.

‘No? You was sent in here because you grunted on the grade,’ Pony interrupted.

‘Where I grunt, you’d lie down, Pony; but, as I was saying, I don’t blow much. Notwithstandin’, if you want to see freight that is freight moved lively, you should see me warbling through the Alleghanies with thirty-seven ore-cars behind me, and my brake-men fightin’ tramps so’s they can’t attend to my tooter. I have to do all the holdin’ back then, and, though I say it, I’ve never had a load get away from me yet. No, sir. Haulin’ ’s one thing, but judgment and discretion’s another. You want judgment in my business.’

‘Ah! But—but are you not paralysed by a sense of your overwhelming responsibilities?’ said a curious, husky voice from a corner.

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‘Who’s that?’ ·007 whispered to the Jersey commuter.

‘Compound—experiment—N.G. She’s bin switchin’ in the B. & A. yards for six months, when she wasn’t in the shops. She’s economical (I call it mean) in her coal, but she takes it out in repairs. Ahem! I presume you found Boston somewhat isolated, madam, after your New York season?’

‘I am never so well occupied as when I am alone.’ The Compound seemed to be talking from halfway up her smoke-stack.

‘Sure,’ said the irreverent Pony, under his breath. ‘They don’t hanker after her any in the yard.’

‘But, with my constitution and temperament—my work lies in Boston—I find your outrecuidance——’

‘Outer which?’ said the Mogul freight.

‘Simple cylinders are good enough for me.’

‘Perhaps I should have, said faroucherie,’ hissed the Compound.

‘I don’t hold with any make of papier-mâché wheel,’ the Mogul insisted.

The Compound sighed pityingly, and said no more.

‘Git ’em all shapes in this world, don’t ye?’ said Pony. ‘That’s Mass’chusetts all over. They half start, an’ then they stick on a dead-centre, an’ blame it all on other folk’s ways o’ treatin’ them. Talkin’ o’ Boston, Comanche told me, last night, he had a hot-box just beyond the Newtons, Friday. That was why, he says, the Accommodation was held up. Made out no end of a tale, Comanche did.’

‘If I’d heard that in the shops, with my boiler out for repairs, I’d know ’t was one o’ Comanche’s lies,’ the New Jersey commuter snapped. ‘Hot-box! Him! What happened was they’d put an extra car on, and he just lay down on the grade and squealed. They had to send 127 to help him through. Made it out a hot-box, did he? Time before that he said he was ditched! Looked me square in the headlight and told me that as cool as—as a water-tank in a cold wave. Hot-box! You ask 127 about Comanche’s hot-box. Why, Comanche he was side-tracked, and 127 (he was just about as mad as they make ’em on account o’ being called out at ten o’clock at night) took hold and whirled her into Boston in seventeen minutes. Hot-box! Hot fraud! That’s what Comanche is.’

Then ·007 put both drivers and his pilot into it, as the saying is, for he asked what sort of thing a hot-box might be?

‘Paint my bell sky blue!’ said Pony, the switcher. ‘Make me a surface-railroad loco with a hardwood skirtin’-board round my wheels! Break me up and cast me into five-cent sidewalk-fakirs’ mechanical toys! Here’s an eight-wheel coupled “American” don’t know what a hot-box is! Never heard of an emergency-stop either, did ye? Don’t know what ye carry jack-screws for? You’re too innocent to be left alone with your own tender. Oh, you—you flat-car!’

There was a roar of escaping steam before any one could answer, and ·007 nearly blistered his paint off with pure mortification.

‘A hot-box,’ began the Compound, picking and choosing the words as though they were coal, ‘a hot-box is the penalty exacted from inexperience by haste. Ahem!’

‘Hot-box!’ said the Jersey Suburban. ‘It’s the price you pay for going on the tear. It’s years since I’ve had one. It’s a disease that don’t attack short-haulers, as a rule.’

‘We never have hot-boxes on the Pennsylvania,’ said the Consolidation. ‘They get ’em in New York—same as nervous prostration.’

‘Ah, go home on a ferry-boat,’ said the Mogul. ‘You think because you use worse grades than our road ’ud allow, you’re a kind of Alleghany angel. Now, I’ll tell you what you . . . Here’s my folk. Well, I can’t stop. See you later, perhaps.’

He rolled forward majestically to the turntable, and swung like a man-of-war in a tideway, till he picked up his track. ‘But as for you, you pea-green swivellin’ coffee-pot [this to ·007], you go out and learn something before you associate with those who’ve made more mileage in a week than you’ll roll up in a year. Costly—perishable—fragile—immediate—that’s me! S’long.’

‘Split my tubes if that’s actin’ polite to a new member o’ the Brotherhood,’ said Pony. ‘There wasn’t any call to trample on ye like that. But manners was left out when Moguls was made. Keep up your fire, kid, an’ burn you own smoke. ’Guess we’ll all be wanted in a minute.’

Men were talking rather excitedly in the roundhouse. One man, in a dingy jersey, said that he hadn’t any locomotives to waste on the yard. Another man, with a piece of crumpled paper in his hand, said that the yard-master said that he was to say that if the other man said anything, he (the other man) was to shut his head. Then the other man waved his arms, and wanted to know if he was expected to keep locomotives in his hip-pocket. Then a man in a black Prince Albert, without a collar, came up dripping, for it was a hot August night, and said that what he said went; and between the three of them the locomotives began to go, too—first the Compound, then the Consolidation, then ·007.

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Now, deep down in his fire-box, ·007 had cherished a hope that as soon as his trial was done, he would be led forth with songs and shoutings, and attached to a green-and-chocolate vestibuled flyer, under charge of a bold and noble engineer, who would pat him on his back, and weep over him and call him his Arab steed. (The boys in the shops where he was built used to read wonderful stories of railroad life, and ·007 expected things to happen as he had heard.) But there did not seem to be many vestibuled flyers in the roaring, rumbling, electric-lighted yards, and his engineer only said:

‘Now, what sort of a fool-sort of an injector has Eustis loaded on to this rig this time?’ And he put the lever over with an angry snap, crying ‘Am I supposed to switch with this thing, hey?’

The collarless man mopped his head, and replied that, in the present state of the yard and freight and a few other things, the engineer would switch and keep on switching till the cows came home. ·007 pushed out gingerly, his heart in his headlight, so nervous that the clang of his own bell almost made him jump the track. Lanterns waved, or danced up and down, before and behind him; and on every side, six tracks deep, sliding backward and forward, with clashings of couplers and squeals of hand-brakes, were cars—more cars than ·007 had dreamed of. There were oil-cars, and hay-cars, and stock-cars full of lowing beasts, and ore-cars, and potato-cars with stovepipe-ends sticking out in the middle; cold-storage and refrigerator cars dripping ice-water on the tracks; ventilated fruit—and milk-cars; flat-cars with truck-waggons full of market-stuff; flat-cars loaded with reapers and binders, all red and green and gilt under the sizzling electric lights; flat cars piled high with strong-scented hides, pleasant hemlock-plank, or bundles of shingles; flat-cars creaking to the weight of thirty-ton castings, angle-irons, and rivet-boxes for some new bridge; and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of box-cars loaded, locked and chalked. Men—hot and angry—crawled among and between and under the thousand wheels; men took flying jumps through his cab, when he halted for a moment; men sat on his pilot as he went forward, and on his tender as he returned; and regiments of men ran along the tops of the box-cars beside him, screwing down brakes, waving their arms, and crying curious things.

He was pushed forward a foot at a time, whirled backwards, his rear drivers clinking and clanking, a quarter of a mile; jerked into a switch (yard-switches are very stubby and unaccommodating), bunted into a Red D, or Merchants’ Transport car, and, with no hint or knowledge of the weight behind him, started up anew. When his load was fairly on the move, three or four cars would be cut off, and ·007 would bound forward, only to be held hiccupping on the brake. Then he would wait a few minutes, watching the whirled lanterns, deafened with the clang of the bells, giddy with the vision of the sliding cars, his brake pump panting forty to the minute, his front coupler lying sideways on his cow-catcher, like a tired dog’s tongue in his mouth, and the whole of him covered with half-burnt coal-dust.

‘’Tisn’t so easy switching with a straight-backed tender,’ said his little friend of the round-house, bustling by at a trot. ‘But you’re cumin’ on pretty fair. Ever seen a flyin’ switch? No? Then watch me.’

Pony was in charge of a dozen heavy flat-cars. Suddenly he shot away from them with a sharp ‘Whutt!’ A switch opened in the shadows ahead; he turned up it like a rabbit, it snapped behind him, and the long line of twelve-foot-high lumber jolted on into the arms of a full-sized road-loco, who acknowledged receipt with a dry howl.

‘My man’s reckoned the smartest in the yard at that trick,’ he said, returning. ‘Gives me cold shivers when another fool tries it, though. That’s where my short wheel-base comes in. Like as not you’d have your tender scraped off if you tried it.’

·007 had no ambitions that way, and said so.

‘No? Of course this ain’t your regular business, but say, don’t you think it’s interestin’? Have you seen the yard-master? Well, he’s the greatest man on earth, an’ don’t you forget it. When are we through? Why, kid, it’s always like this, day an’ night—Sundays and week-days. See that thirty-car freight slidin’ in four, no, five tracks off? She’s all mixed freight, sent here to be sorted out into straight trains. That’s why we’re cuttin’ out the cars one by one.’ He gave a vigorous push to a west-bound car as he spoke, and started back with a little snort of surprise, for the car was an old friend—an M.T.K. box-car.

‘Jack my drivers, but it’s Homeless Kate. Why, Kate, ain’t there no gettin’ you back to your friends? There’s forty chasers out for you from your road, if there’s one. Who’s holdin’ you now?’

‘Wish I knew,’ whimpered Homeless Kate. ‘I belong in Topeka, but I’ve bin to Cedar Rapids; I’ve bin to Winnipeg; I’ve bin to Newport News; I’ve bin all down the old Atlanta and West Point; an’ I’ve bin to Buffalo. Maybe I’ll fetch up at Haverstraw. I’ve only bin out ten months, but I’m homesick—I’m just achin’ homesick.’

‘Try Chicago, Katie,’ said the switching-loco; and the battered old car lumbered down the track, jolting; ‘I want to be in Kansas when the sunflowers bloom.’

‘Yard’s full o’ Homeless Kates an’ Wanderin’ Willies,’ he explained to ·007. ‘I knew an old Fitchburg flat-car out seventeen months; an’ one of ours was gone fifteen ’fore ever we got track of her. Dunno quite how our men fix it. Swap around, I guess. Anyway, I’ve done my duty. She’s on her way to Kansas, via Chicago; but I’ll lay my next boilerful she’ll be held there to wait consignee’s convenience, and sent back to us with wheat in the fall.”

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Just then the Pittsburgh Consolidation passed, at the head of a dozen cars.

‘I’m goin’ home,’ he said proudly.

‘Can’t get all them twelve on to the flat. Break ’em in half, Dutchy! ‘cried Pony. But it was ·007 who was backed down to the last six cars, and he nearly blew up with surprise when he found himself pushing them on to a huge ferryboat. He had never seen deep water before, and shivered as the flat drew away and left his bogies within six inches of the black, shiny tide.

After this he was hurried to the freight-house, where he saw the yard-master, a smallish, white-faced man in shirt, trousers, and slippers, looking down upon a sea of trucks, a mob of bawling truckmen, and squadrons of backing, turning, sweating, spark-striking horses.

‘That’s shippers’ carts loadin’ on to the receivin’ trucks,’ said the small engine reverently. ‘But he don’t care. He lets ’em cuss. He’s the Czar—King—Boss! He says “Please,” and then they kneel down an’ pray. There’s three or four strings o’ to-day’s freight to be pulled before he can attend to them. When he waves his hand that way, things happen.’

A string of loaded cars slid out down the track, and a string of empties took their place. Bales, crates, boxes, jars, carboys, frails, cases, and packages; flew into them from the freight-house as though the cars had been magnets and they iron filings.

‘Ki-yah!’ shrieked little Pony. ‘Ain’t it great?’

A purple-faced truckman shouldered his way to the yard-master, and shook his fist under his nose.

The yard-master never looked up from his bundle of freight-receipts. He crooked his forefinger slightly, and a tall young man in a red shirt, lounging carelessly beside him, hit the truckman under the left ear, so that he dropped, quivering and clucking, on a hay-bale.

‘Eleven, seven, ninety-seven, L.Y.S.; fourteen ought ought three; nineteen thirteen; one one four; seventeen ought twenty-one M. B.; and the ten west-bound. All straight except the two last. Cut ’em off at the junction. An’ that’s all right. Pull that string.’ The yard-master, with mild blue eyes, looked out over the howling truckmen at the waters in the moonlight beyond, and hummed:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lawd Gawd made them all!

·007 moved the cars out and delivered them to the regular road-engine. He had never felt quite so limp in his life.

‘Curious, ain’t it?’ said Pony, puffing, on the next track. ‘You an’ me, if we got that man under our bumpers, we’d work him into red waste and not know what we’d done; but—up there—with the steam hummin’ in his boiler that awful quiet way . . .’

‘I know,’ said ·007. ‘Makes me feel as if I’d dropped my fire an’ was getting cold. He is the greatest man on earth.’

They were at the far north end of the yard now, under a switch-tower, looking down on the four-track way of the main traffic. The Boston Compound was to haul ·007’s string to some faraway northern junction over an indifferent road-bed, and she mourned aloud for the ninety-six pound rails of the B.&A.

‘You’re young; you’re young,’ she coughed. ‘You don’t realise your responsibilities.’

‘Yes, he does,’ said Pony sharply; ‘but he don’t lie down under ’em.’ Then, with a sidespurt of steam, exactly like a tough spitting ‘There ain’t more than fifteen thousand dollars’ worth o’ freight behind her anyway, and she carries on as if ’twere a hundred thousand—same as the Mogul’s. Excuse me, madam, but you’ve the track. . . . She’s stuck on a dead-centre again—bein’ specially designed not to.’

The Compound crawled across the tracks on a long slant, groaning horribly at each switch, and moving like a cow in a snow-drift. There was a little pause along the yard after her tail-lights had disappeared; switches locked crisply, and every one seemed to be waiting.

‘Now I’ll show you something worth,’ said Pony. ‘When the Purple Emperor ain’t on time, it’s about time to amend the Constitution. The first stroke of twelve is——’

‘Boom!’ went the clock in the big yard-tower, and far away ·007 heard a full vibrating ‘Yah! Yah! Yah!’ A headlight twinkled on the horizon like a star, grew an overpowering blaze, and whooped up the humming track to the roaring music of a happy giant’s song:

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With a michnai—ghignai—shtingal! Yah! Yah! Yah!
Ein—zwei—drei—Mutter! Yah! Yah! Yah!
She climbed upon der shteeple,
Und she frighten all der people,
Singin’ michnai—ghignai—shtingal! Yah! Yah!

The last defiant ‘yah! yah!’ was delivered a mile and a half beyond the passenger-depôt; but ·007 had caught one glimpse of the superb six-wheel-coupled racing-locomotive, who hauled the pride and glory of the road—the gilt-edged Purple Emperor, the millionaires’ south-bound express, laying the miles over his shoulder as a man peels a shaving from a soft board. The rest was a blur of maroon enamel, a bar of white light from the electrics in the cars, and a flicker of nickel-plated hand-rail on the rear platform.

‘Ooh!’ said ·007.

‘Seventy-five miles an hour these five miles. Baths, I’ve heard; barber’s shop; ticker; and a library and the rest to match. Yes, sir; seventy-five an hour! But he’ll talk to you in the roundhouse just as democratic as I would. And I—cuss—my wheel-base!—I’d kick clean off the track at half his gait. He’s the master of our Lodge. Cleans up at our house. I’ll introdooce you some day. He’s worth knowin’! There ain’t many can sing that song, either.’

·007 was too full of emotions to answer. He did not hear a raging of telephone-bells in the switch-tower, nor the man, as he leaned out and called to ·007’s engineer: ‘Got any steam?’

‘ ’Nough to run her a hundred mile out o’ this, if I could,’ said the engineer, who belonged to the open road and hated switching.

‘Then get. The Flying Freight’s ditched forty mile out, with fifty rod o’ track ploughed up. No; no one’s hurt, but both tracks are blocked. Lucky the wreckin’-car an’ derrick are this end of the yard. Crew’ll be along in a minute. Hurry! You’ve the track.’

‘Well, I could jest kick my little sawed-off self,’ said Pony, as ·007 was backed, with a bang, on to a grim and grimy car like a caboose, but full of tools—a flat-car and a derrick behind it. ‘Some folks are one thing, and some are another; but you’re in luck, kid. They push a wrecking-car. Now, don’t get rattled. Your wheel-base will keep you on the track, and there ain’t any curves worth mentionin’. Oh, say! Comanche told me there’s one section o’ saw-edged track that’s liable to jounce ye a little. Fifteen an’ a half out, after the grade at Jackson’s crossin’. You’ll know it by a farmhouse an’ a windmill and five maples in the dooryard. Windmill’s west o’ the maples. An’ there’s an eighty-foot iron bridge in the middle o’ that section with no guard-rails. See you later. Luck!’

Before he knew well what had happened, ·007 was flying up the track into the dumb dark world. Then fears of the night beset him. He remembered all he had ever heard of landslides, rain-piled boulders, blown trees, and strayed cattle, all that the Boston Compound had ever said of responsibility, and a great deal more that came out of his own head. With a very quavering voice he whistled for his first grade crossing (an event in the life of a locomotive), and his nerves were in no way restored by the sight of a frantic horse, and a white-faced man in a buggy less than a yard from his right shoulder. Then he was sure he would jump the track; felt his flanges mounting the rail at every curve; knew that his first grade would make him lie down even as Comanche had done at the Newtons. He swept down the grade to Jackson’s crossing, saw the windmill west of the maples, felt the badly-laid rails spring under him, and sweated big drops all over his boiler. At each jarring bump he believed an axle had smashed; and he took the eighty-foot bridge without the guard-rail like a hunted cat on the top of a fence. Then a wet leaf stuck against the glass of his headlight and threw a flying shadow on the track, so that he thought it was some little dancing animal that would feel soft if he ran over it; and anything soft underfoot frightens a locomotive as it does an elephant. But the men behind seemed quite calm. The wrecking-crew were climbing carelessly from the caboose to the tender—even jesting with the engineer, for he heard a shuffling of feet among the coal, and the snatch of a song, something like this:

Oh, the Empire State must learn to wait,
And the Cannon-ball go hang,
When the West-bound’s ditched, and the tool-car’s hitched,
And it’s ’way for the Breakdown Gang (Tara-ra!)
’Way for the Breakdown Gang!

‘Say! Eustis knew what he was doin’ when he designed this rig. She’s a hummer. New, too.’

‘Sniff! Phew! She is new. That ain’t paint. That’s——’

A burning pain shot through ·007’s right rear driver—a crippling, stinging pain.

‘This,’ said ·007, as he flew, ‘is a hot-box. Now I know what it means. I shall go to pieces, I guess. My first road-run, too!’

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‘Het a bit, ain’t she?’ the fireman ventured to suggest to the engineer.

‘She’ll hold for all we want of her. We’re ’most there. ‘Guess you chaps back had better climb into your car,’ said the engineer, his hand on the brake-lever. ‘I’ve seen men snapped off——’

But the crew fled laughing. They had no wish to be jerked on to the track. The engineer half turned his wrist, and ·007 found his drivers pinned firm.

‘Now it’s come!’ said ·007, as he yelled aloud, and slid like a sleigh. For the moment he fancied that he would jerk bodily from off his underpinning.

‘That must be the emergency-stop Pony guyed me about,’ he gasped, as soon as he could think. ‘Hot-box—emergency-stop. They both hurt; but now I can talk back in the round-house.’

He was halted, all hissing hot, a few feet in the rear of what doctors would call a compound-comminuted car. His engineer was kneeling down among his drivers, but he did not call ·007 his ‘Arab steed,’ nor cry over him, as the engineers did in the newspapers. He just bad-worded ·007, and pulled yards of charred cotton-waste from about the axles, and hoped he might some day catch the idiot who had packed it. Nobody else attended to him, for Evans, the Mogul’s engineer, a little cut about the head, but very angry, was exhibiting, by lantern-light, the mangled corpse of a slim blue pig.

‘’T weren’t even a decent-sized hog,’ he said. ‘’T were a shote.’

‘Dangerousest beasts they are,’ said one of the crew. ‘Get under the pilot an’ sort o’ twiddle ye off the track, don’t they?’

‘Don’t they?’ roared Evans, who was a red headed Welshman. ‘You talk as if I was ditched by a hog every fool-day o’ the week. I ain’t friends with all the cussed half-fed shotes in the State o’ New York. No, indeed! Yes, this is him—an’ look what he’s done!’

It was not a bad night’s work for one stray piglet. The Flying Freight seemed to have flown in every direction, for the Mogul had mounted the rails and run diagonally a few hundred feet from right to left, taking with him such cars as cared to follow. Some did not. They broke their couplers and lay down, while rear cars frolicked over them. In that game, they had ploughed up and removed and twisted a good deal of the left-hand track. The Mogul himself had waddled into a corn-field, and there he knelt—fantastic wreaths of green twisted round his crank-pins; his pilot covered with solid clods of field, on which corn nodded drunkenly; his fire put out with dirt (Evans had done that as soon as he recovered his senses); and his broken headlight half full of half-burnt moths. His tender had thrown coal all over him, and he looked like a disreputable buffalo who had tried to wallow in a general store. For there lay, scattered over the landscape, from the burst cars, typewriters, sewing-machines, bicycles in crates, a consignment of silver-plated imported harness, French dresses and gloves, a dozen finely moulded hardwood mantels, a fifteen-foot naphtha-launch, with. a solid brass bedstead crumpled around her bows, a case of telescopes and microscopes, two coffins, a case of very best candies, some gilt-edged dairy produce, butter and eggs in an omelette, a broken box of expensive toys, and a few hundred other luxuries. A camp of tramps hurried up from nowhere, and generously volunteered to help the crew. So the brakemen, armed with coupler-pins, walked up and down on one side, and the freight-conductor and the fireman patrolled the other with their hands in their hip-pockets. A long-bearded man came out of a house beyond the corn-field, and told Evans that if the accident had happened a little later in the year, all his corn would have been burned, and accused Evans of carelessness. Then he ran away, for Evans was at his heels shrieking, ‘’Twas his hog done it—his hog done it! Let me kill him! Let me kill him!’ Then the wrecking-crew laughed; and the farmer put his head out of a window and said that Evans was no gentleman.

But ·007 was very sober. He had never seen a wreck before, and it frightened him. The crew still laughed, but they worked at the same time; and ·007 forgot horror in amazement at the way they handled the Mogul freight. They dug round him with spades; they put ties in front of his wheels, and jack-screws under him; they embraced him with the derrick-chain and tickled him with crowbars; while ·007 was hitched on to wrecked cars and backed away till the knot broke or the cars rolled clear of the track. By dawn thirty or forty men’ were at work, replacing and ramming down the ties, gauging the rails and spiking them. By daylight all cars who could move had gone on in charge of another loco; the track was freed for traffic; and ·007 had hauled the old Mogul over a small pavement of ties, inch by inch, till his flanges bit the rail once more, and he settled down with a clank. But his spirit was broken, and his nerve was gone.

‘’T weren’t even a hog,’ he repeated dolefully; ‘’t were a shote; and you—you of all of ’em—had to help me on.’

‘But how in the whole long road did it happen?’ asked ·007, sizzling with curiosity.

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‘Happen! It didn’t happen! It just come! I sailed right on top of him around that last curve—thought he was a skunk. Yes; he was all as little as that. He hadn’t more’n squealed once ’fore I felt my bogies lift (he’d rolled right under the pilot), and I couldn’t catch the track again to save me. Swivelled clean off, I was. Then I felt him sling himself along, all greasy, under my left leadin’ driver, and, oh, Boilers! that mounted the rail. I heard my flanges zippin’ along the ties, an’ the next I knew I was playin’ “Sally, Sally Waters” in the corn, my tender shuckin’ coal through my cab, an’ old man Evans lying’ still an’ bleedin’ in front o’ me. Shook? There ain’t a stay or a bolt or a rivet in me that ain’t sprung to glory somewhere.’

‘Umm!’ said ·007. ‘What d’ you reckon you weigh?’

‘Without these lumps o’ dirt I’m all of a hundred thousand pound.’

‘And the shote?’

‘Eighty. Call him a hundred pounds at the outside. He’s worth about four’n a half dollars. Ain’t it awful? Ain’t it enough to give you nervous prostration? Ain’t it paralysin’? Why, I come just around that curve——’ and the Mogul told the tale again, for he was very badly shaken.

‘Well, it’s all in the day’s run, I guess,’ said ·007, soothingly; ‘an’—an’ a corn-field’s pretty soft fallin’.’

‘If it had bin a sixty-foot bridge, an’ I could ha’ slid off into deep water, an’ blown up an’ killed both men, same as others have done, I wouldn’t ha’ cared: but to be ditched by a shote—an’ you to help me out—in a corn-field—an’ an old hayseed in his nightgown cussin’ me like as if I was a sick truck-horse! . . . Oh, it’s awful! Don’t call me Mogul! I’m a sewin’-machine. They’ll guy my sand-box off in the yard.’

And ·007, his hot-box cooled and his experience vastly enlarged, hauled the Mogul freight slowly to the round-house.

‘Hello, old man! Bin out all night, hain’t ye?’ said the irrepressible Pony, who had just come off duty. ‘Well, I must say you look it. Costly—perishable—fragile—immediate—that’s you! Go to the shops, take them vine-leaves out o’ your hair, an’ git ’em to play the hose on you.’

‘Leave him alone, Pony,’ said ·007 severely, as he was swung on the turn-table, ’or I’ll——’

‘’Didn’t know the old granger was any special friend o’ yours, kid. He wasn’t over civil to you last time I saw him.’

‘I know it; but I’ve seen a wreck since then, and it has about scared the paint off me. I’m not going to guy any one as long as I steam—not when they’re new to the business an’ anxious to learn. And I’m not goin’ to guy the old Mogul either, though I did find him wreathed around with roastin’-ears. ’Twas a little bit of a shote—not a hog—just a shote, Pony—no bigger’n a lump of anthracite—I saw it—that made all the mess. Anybody can be ditched, I guess.’

‘Found that out already, have you? Well, that’s a good beginnin’.’ It was the Purple Emperor, with his high, tight, plate-glass cab and green velvet cushion, waiting to be cleaned for his next day’s fly.

‘Let me make you two gen’lemen acquainted,’ said Pony. ‘This is our Purple Emperor, kid, whom you were admirin’ and, I may say, envyin’ last night. This is a new brother, worshipful sir, with most of his mileage ahead of him, but, so far as a serving brother can, I’ll answer for him.’

‘’Happy to meet you,’ said the Purple Emperor, with a glance round the crowded round-house. ‘I guess there are enough of us here to form a full meetin’. Ahem! By virtue of the authority vested in me as Head of the Road, I hereby declare and pronounce No. ·007 a full and accepted Brother of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Locomotives, and as such entitled to all shop, switch, track, tank, and round-house privileges throughout my jurisdiction, in the Degree of Superior Flier, it bein’ well known and credibly reported to me that our Brother has covered forty-one miles in thirty-nine minutes and a half on an errand of mercy to the afflicted. At a convenient time, I myself will communicate to you the ‘Song and Signal of this Degree whereby you may be recognised in the darkest night. Take your stall, newly-entered Brother among Locomotives!’

Now, in the darkest night, even as the Purple Emperor said, if you will stand on the bridge across the freight-yard, looking down upon the four-track way, at 2.30 A.M., neither before nor after, when the White Moth, that takes the overflow from the Purple Emperor, tears south with her seven vestibuled cream-white cars, you will hear, as the yard-clock makes the half-hour, a faraway sound like the bass of a violoncello, and then, a hundred feet to each word:

With a michnai—ghignai—shtingal!  Yah! Yah! Yah
Ein—zwei—drei—Mutter!  Yah! Yah! Yah
She climb upon der shteeple,
Und she frighten all der people,
Singin’ michnai—ghignai—shtingal!  Yah! Yah!

That is ·007 covering his one hundred and fifty six miles in two hundred and twenty-one minutes.

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ACCORDING to the custom of Vermont, Sunday afternoon is salting-time on the farm, and, unless something very important happens, we attend to the salting ourselves. Dave and Pete, the red oxen, are treated first; they stay in the home meadow ready for work on Monday. Then come the cows, with Pan, the calf, who should have been turned into veal long ago, but survived on account of his manners; and lastly the horses, scattered through the seventy acres of the Back Pasture. You must go down by the brook that feeds the clicking, bubbling water-ram; up through the sugar-bush, where the young maple undergrowth closes round you like a shallow sea; next follow the faint line of an old county-road running past two green hollows fringed with wild rose that mark the cellars of two ruined houses; then by Lost Orchard, where nobody ever comes except in cider-time; then across another brook, and so into the Back Pasture. Half of it is pine and hemlock and Spruce, with sumach and little juniper bushes, and the other half is grey rock and boulder and moss, with green streaks of brake and swamp; but the horses like it well enough—our own, and the others that are turned down there to feed at fifty cents a week. Most people walk to the Back Pasture, and find it very rough work; but one can get there in a buggy, if the horse knows what is expected of him. The safest conveyance is our coupé. This began life as a buckboard, and we bought it for five dollars from a sorrowful man who had no other sort of possessions; and the seat came off one night when we were turning a corner in a hurry. After that alteration it made a beautiful salting-machine, if you held tight, because there was nothing to catch your feet when you fell out, and the slats rattled tunes.

One Sunday afternoon we went out with the salt as usual. It was a broiling hot day, and we could not find the horses anywhere till we let Tedda Gabler, the bobtailed mare who throws up the dirt with her big hooves exactly as a tedder throws hay, have her head. Clever as she is, she tipped the coupé over in a hidden brook before she came out on a ledge of rock where all the horses had gathered, and were switching flies. The Deacon was the first to call to her. He is a very dark iron-grey four-year-old, son of Grandee. He has been handled since he was two, was driven in a light cart before he was three, and now ranks as an absolutely steady lady’s horse—proof against steam-rollers, grade-crossings, and street processions.

“Salt!” said the Deacon, joyfully. “You’re dreffle late, Tedda.”

“Any—any place to cramp the coupé?” Tedda panted. “It weighs turr’ble this weather. I’d ’a’ come sooner, but they didn’t know what they wanted—ner haow. Fell out twice, both of ’em. I don’t understand sech foolishness.”

“You look consider’ble het up. ’Guess you’d better cramp her under them pines, an’ cool off a piece.”

Tedda scrambled on the ledge, and cramped the coupé in the shade of a tiny little wood of pines, while my companion and I lay down among the brown, silky needles, and gasped. All the home horses were gathered round us, enjoying their Sunday leisure.

There were Rod and Rick, the seniors on the farm. They were the regular road-pair, bay with black points, full brothers, aged, sons of a Hambletonian sire and a Morgan dam. There were Nip and Tuck, seal-browns, rising six, brother and sister, Black Hawks by birth, perfectly matched, just finishing their education, and as handsome a pair as man could wish to find in a forty-mile drive. There was Muldoon, our ex-car-horse, bought at a venture, and any colour you choose that is not white; and Tweezy, who comes from Kentucky, with an affliction of his left hip, which makes him a little uncertain how his hind legs are moving. He and Muldoon had been hauling gravel all the week for our new road. The Deacon you know already. Last of all, and eating something, was our faithful Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the black buggy-horse, who had seen us through every state of weather and road, the horse who was always standing in harness before some door or other—a philosopher with the appetite of a shark and the manners of an archbishop. Tedda Gabler was a new “trade,” with a reputation for vice which was really the result of bad driving. She had one working gait, which she could hold till further notice; a Roman nose; a large, prominent eye; a shaving-brush of a tail; and an irritable temper. She took her salt through her bridle; but the others trotted up nuzzling and wickering for theirs, till we emptied it on the clean rocks. They were all standing at ease, on three legs for the most part, talking the ordinary gossip of the Back Pasture—about the scarcity of water, and gaps in the fence, and how the early windfalls tasted that season—when little Rick blew the last few grains of his allowance into a crevice, and said:

“Hurry, boys! Might ha’ knowed that livery plug would be around.”

We heard a clatter of hooves, and there climbed up from the ravine below a fifty-center transient—a wall-eyed, yellow frame-house of a horse, sent up to board from a livery-stable in town, where they called him “The Lamb,” and never let him out except at night and to strangers. My companion, who knew and had broken most of the horses, looked at the ragged hammer-head as it rose, and said quietly:

“Ni-ice beast. Man-eater, if he gets the chance—see his eye. Kicker, too—see his hocks. Western horse.”

The animal lumbered up, snuffling and grunting. His feet showed that he had not worked for weeks and weeks, and our creatures drew together significantly.

“As usual,” he said, with an underhung sneer—“bowin’ your heads before the Oppressor that comes to spend his leisure gloatin’ over you.”

“Mine’s done,” said the Deacon; he licked up the remnant of his salt, dropped his nose in his master’s hand, and sang a little grace all to himself. The Deacon has the most enchanting manners of any one I know.

“An’ fawnin’ on them for what is your inalienable right. It’s humiliatin’,” said the yellow horse, sniffing to see if he could find a few spare grains.

“Go daown hill, then, Boney,” the Deacon replied. “Guess you’ll find somethin’ to eat still, if yer hain’t hogged it all. You’ve ett more’n any three of us today—an’ day ’fore that—an’ the last two months—sence you’ve been here.”

“I am not addressin’ myself to the young an’ immature. I am speakin’ to those whose opinion an’ experience commands respect.”

I saw Rod raise his head as though he were about to make a remark; then he dropped it again, and stood three-cornered, like a plough-horse. Rod can cover his mile in a shade under three minutes on an ordinary road to an ordinary buggy. He is tremendously powerful behind, but, like most Hambletonians, he grows a trifle sullen as he gets older. No one can love Rod very much; but no one can help respecting him.

“I wish to wake those,” the yellow horse went on, “to an abidin’ sense o’ their wrongs an’ their injuries an’ their outrages.”

“Haow’s that?” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, dreamily. He thought Boney was talking of some kind of feed.

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“An’ when I say outrages and injuries”—Boney waved his tail furiously “I mean ’em, too. Great Oats! That’s just what I do mean, plain an’ straight.”

“The gentleman talks quite earnest,” said Tuck, the mare, to Nip, her brother, “There’s no doubt thinkin’ broadens the horizons o’ the mind. His language is quite lofty.”

“Hesh, sis,” Nip answered. “He hain’t widened nothin’ ’cep’ the circle he’s ett in pasture. They feed words fer beddin’ where he comes from.”

“It’s elegant talkin’, though,” Tuck returned, with an unconvinced toss of her pretty, lean little head.

The yellow horse heard her, and struck an attitude which he meant to be extremely impressive. It made him look as though he had been badly stuffed.

“Now I ask you, I ask you without prejudice an’ without favour,—what has Man the Oppressor ever done for you?—Are you not inalienably entitled to the free air O’ heaven, blowin’ acrost this boundless prairie?”

“Hev ye ever wintered here?” said the Deacon, merrily, while the others snickered. “It’s kinder cool.”

“Not yet,” said Boney. “I come from the boundless confines o’ Kansas, where the noblest of our kind have their abidin’-place among the sunflowers on the threshold o’ the settin’ sun in his glory.”

“An’ they sent you ahead as a sample—” said Rick, with an amused quiver of his long, beautifully groomed tail, as thick and as fine and as wavy as a quadroon’s back hair.

“Kansas, sir, needs no advertisement. Her native sons rely on themselves an’ their native sires. Yes, sir.”

Then Tweezy lifted up his wise and polite old head. His affliction makes him bashful as a rule, but he is ever the most courteous of horses.

“Excuse me, suh,” he said slowly, “but, unless I have been misinfohmed, most of your prominent siahs, suh, are impo’ted from Kentucky; an’ I’m from Paduky.”

There was the least little touch of pride in the last words.

“Any horse dat knows beans,” said Muldoon, suddenly (he had been standing with his hairy chin on Tweezy’s broad quarters), “gits outer Kansas ’fore dey crip his shoes. I blew in dere from Ioway in de days o’ me youth an’ innocence, an’ I wuz grateful when dey boxed me fer N’ York. You can’t tell me anything about Kansas I don’t wanter fergit. De Belt Line stables ain’t no Hoffman House, but dey’re Vanderbilts ’longside Kansas.”

“What the horses o’ Kansas think today, the horses of America will think tomorrow; an’ I tell you that when the horses of America rise in their might, the day o’ the Oppressor is ended.”

There was a pause, till Rick said, with a little grunt:

“Ef you put it that way, every one of us has riz in his might, ’cep’ Marcus, mebbe. Marky, ’j ever rise in yer might?”

“Nope,” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, thoughtfully quidding over a mouthful of grass. “I seen a heap o’ fools try, though.”

“You admit that you riz—” said the Kansas horse, excitedly. “Then why—why in Kansas did you ever go under again?”

“’Horse can’t walk on his hind legs all the time,” said the Deacon.

“Not when he’s jerked over on his back ’fore he knows what fetched him. We’ve all done it, Boney,” said Rick. “Nip an’ Tuck they tried it, spite o’ what the Deacon told ’em; an’ the Deacon he tried it, spite o’ what me an’ Rod told him; an’ me an’ Rod tried it, spite o’ what Grandee told us; an’ I guess Grandee he tried it, spite o’ what his dam told him. It’s the same old circus from generation to generation. ’Colt can’t see why he’s called on to back. Same old rearn’ on end—straight up. Same old feelin’ that you’ve bested ’em this time. Same old little yank at your mouth when you’re up good an’ tall. Same old Pegasus-act, wonderin’ where you’ll ’light. Same old wop when you hit the dirt with your head where your tail should be, and your in’ards shook up like a bran-mash. Same old voice in your ear: ‘Waal, ye little fool, an’ what did you reckon to make by that?’ We’re through with risin in our might on this farm. We go to pole er single, accordin’ ez we’re hitched.”

“An’ Man the Oppressor sets an’ gloats over you, same as he’s settin’ now. Hain’t that been your experience, madam?”

This last remark was addressed to Tedda; and any one could see with half an eye that poor, old anxious, fidgety Tedda, stamping at the flies, must have left a wild and tumultuous youth behind her.

“’Pends on the man,” she answered, shifting from one foot to the other, and addressing herself to the home horses. “They abused me dreffle when I was young. I guess I was sperrity an’ nervous some, but they didn’t allow for that.’Twas in Monroe County, Noo York, an’ sence then till I come here, I’ve run away with more men than ’u’d fill a boardin’-house. Why, the man that sold me here he says to the boss, s’ he: ‘Mind, now, I’ve warned you. ’Twon’t be none of my fault if she sheds you daown the road. Don’t you drive her in a top-buggy, ner ’thout winkers,’ s’ he, ’ner ’thought this bit ef you look to come home behind her.’ ’N’ the fust thing the boss did was to git the top-buggy.”

“Can’t say as I like top-buggies,” said Rick; “they don’t balance good.”

“Suit me to a ha’ar,” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. “Top-buggy means the baby’s in behind, an’ I kin stop while she gathers the pretty flowers—yes, an’ pick a maouthful, too. The women-folk all say I hev to be humoured, an’—I don’t kerry things to the sweatin’-point.”

“’Course I’ve no prejudice against a top-buggy s’ long ’s I can see it,” Tedda went on quickly. “It’s ha’f-seein’ the pesky thing bobbin’ an’ balancn’ behind the winkers gits on my nerves. Then the boss looked at the bit they’d sold with me, an’ s’ he: ‘Jiminy Christmas! This ’u’d make a clothes-horse Stan’ ’n end!’ Then he gave me a plain bar bit, an’ fitted it’s if there was some feelin’ to my maouth.”

“Hain’t ye got any, Miss Tedda?” said Tuck, who has a mouth like velvet, and knows it.

“Might ’a’ had, Miss Tuck, but I’ve forgot. Then he give me an open bridle,—my style’s an open bridle—an’—I dunno as I ought to tell this by rights—he—give—me—a kiss.”

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“My!” said Tuck, “I can’t tell fer the shoes o’ me what makes some men so fresh.”

“Pshaw, sis,” said Nip, “what’s the sense in actin’ so? You git a kiss reg’lar‘s hitchin’-up time.”

“Well, you needn’t tell, smarty,” said Tuck, with a squeal and a kick.

“I’d heard o’ kisses, o’ course,” Tedda went on, “but they hadn’t come my way specially. I don’t mind tellin’ I was that took aback at that man’s doin’s he might ha’ lit fire-crackers on my saddle. Then we went out jest’s if a kiss was nothin’, an’ I wasn’t three strides into my gait ’fore I felt the boss knoo his business, an’ was trustin’ me. So I studied to please him, an’ he never took the whip from the dash—a whip drives me plumb distracted—an’ the upshot was that—waal, I’ve come up the Back Pasture today, an’ the coupé’s tipped clear over twice, an’ I’ve waited till ’twuz fixed each time. You kin judge for yourselves. I don’t set up to be no better than my neighbours,—specially with my tail snipped off the way ’tis,—but I want you all to know Tedda’s quit fightin’ in harness or out of it, ’cep’ when there’s a born fool in the pasture, stuffin’ his stummick with board that ain’t rightly hisn, ’cause he hain’t earned it.”

“Meanin’ me, madam?” said the yellow horse.

“Ef the shoe fits, clinch it,” said Tedda, snorting. “I named no names, though, to be sure, some folks are mean enough an’ greedy enough to do ’thout ’em.”

“There’s a deal to be forgiven to ignorance,” said the yellow horse, with an ugly look in his blue eye.

“Seemin’ly, yes; or some folks ’u’d ha’ been kicked raound the pasture ’bout onct a minute sence they came—board er no board.”

“But what you do not understand, if you will excuse me, madam, is that the whole principle o’ servitood, which includes keep an’ feed, starts from a radically false basis; an’ I am proud to say that me an’ the majority o’ the horses o’ Kansas think the entire concern should be relegated to the limbo of exploded superstitions. I say we’re too progressive for that. I say we’re too enlightened for that. ’Twas good enough ‘s long ‘s we didn’t think, but naow—but naow—a new loominary has arisen on the horizon!”

“Meanin’ you?” said the Deacon.

“The horses o’ Kansas are behind me with their multitoodinous thunderin’ hooves, an’ we say, simply but grandly, that we take our stand with all four feet on the inalienable rights of the horse, pure and simple,—the high-toned child o’ nature, fed by the same wavin’ grass, cooled by the same ripplin’ brook— yes, an’ warmed by the same gen’rous sun as falls impartially on the outside an’ the inside of the pampered machine o’ the trottin’-track, or the bloated coupé-horses o’ these yere Eastern cities. Are we not the same flesh an’ blood?”

“Not by a bushel an’ a half,” said the Deacon, under his breath. “Grandee never was in Kansas.”

“My! Ain’t that elegant, though, abaout the wavin’ grass an’ the ripplin’ brooks?” Tuck whispered in Nip’s ear. “The gentleman’s real convincin’ I think.”

“I say we are the same flesh an’ blood! Are we to be separated, horse from horse, by the artificial barriers of a trottin’-record, or are we to look down upon each other on the strength o’ the gifts o’ nature—an extry inch below the knee, or slightly more powerful quarters? What’s the use o’ them advantages to you? Man the Oppressor comes along, an’ sees you’re likely an’ good-lookin’, an’ grinds you to the face o’ the earth. What for? For his own pleasure: for his own convenience! Young an’ old, black an’ bay, white an’ grey, there’s no distinctions made between us. We’re ground up together under the remorseless teeth o’ the engines of oppression!”

“Guess his breechin’ must ha’ broke goin’ daown-hill,” said the Deacon. “Slippery road, maybe, an’ the buggy come onter him, an’ he didn’t know ’nough to hold back. That don’t feel like teeth, though. Maybe he busted a shaft, an’ it pricked him.”

“An’ I come to you from Kansas, wavin’ the tail o’ friendship to all an’ sundry, an’ in the name of the uncounted millions o’ pure-minded, high-toned horses now strugglin’ towards the light o’ freedom, I say to you, rub noses with us in our sacred an’ holy cause. The power is yourn. Without you, I say, Man the Oppressor cannot move himself from place to place. Without you he cannot reap, he cannot sow, he cannot plough.”

“Mighty odd place, Kansas!” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. “Seemin’ly they reap in the spring an’ plough in the fall. ’Guess it’s right fer them, but ’twould make me kinder giddy.”

“The produc’s of your untirin’ industry would rot on the ground if you did not weakly consent to help him. Let ’em rot, I say! Let him call you to the stables in vain an’ nevermore! Let him shake his ensnarin’ oats under your nose in vain! Let the Brahmas roost in the buggy, an’ the rats run riot round the reaper! Let him walk on his two hind feet till they blame well drop off! Win no more soul-destroyn’ races for his pleasure! Then, an’ not till then, will Man the Oppressor know where he’s at. Quit workin’, fellow-sufferers an’ slaves! Kick! Rear! Plunge! Lie down on the shafts, an’ woller! Smash an’ destroy! The conflict will be but short, an’ the victory is certain. After that we can press our inalienable rights to eight quarts o’ oats a day, two good blankets, an’ a fly-net an’ the best o’ stablin’.”

The yellow horse shut his yellow teeth with a triumphant snap; and Tuck said, With a sigh: “Seems’s if somethin’ ought to be done. Don’t seem right, somehow,—oppressin’ us an all,—to my way o’ thinkin’.”

Said Muldoon, in a far-away and sleepy voice: “Who in Vermont’s goin’ to haul de inalienable oats? Dey weigh like Sam Hill, an’ sixty bushel at dat allowance ain’t goin’ to last t’ree weeks here. An’ dere’s de winter hay for five mont’s!”

“We can settle those minor details when the great cause is won,” said the yellow horse. “Let us return simply but grandly to our inalienable rights—the right o’ freedom on these yere verdant hills, an’ no invijjus distinctions o’ track an’ pedigree:”

“What in stables “jer call an invijjus distinction?” said the Deacon, stiffly.

“Fer one thing, bein’ a bloated, pampered trotter jest because you happen to be raised that way, an’ couldn’t no more help trottin’ than eatin’.”

“Do ye know anythin’ about trotters?” said the Deacon.

“I’ve seen ’em trot. That was enough for me. I don’t want to know any more. Trottin’ ‘s immoral.”

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“Waal, I’ll tell you this much. They don’t bloat, an’ they don’t pamp—much. I don’t hold out to be no trotter myself, though I am free to say I had hopes that way—onct. But I do say, fer I’ve seen ’em trained, that a trotter don’t trot with his feet: he trots with his head; an’ he does more work—ef you know what that is—in a week than you er your sire ever done in all your lives. He’s everlastingly at it, a trotter is; an’ when he isn’t, he’s studyin’ haow. You seen ’em trot? Much you hev! You was hitched to a rail, back o’ the stand, in a buckboard with a soap-box nailed on the slats, an’ a frowzy buff’lo atop, while your man peddled rum fer lemonade to little boys as thought they was actin’ manly, till you was both run off the track an’ jailed—you intoed, shufflin’, sway-backed, wind-suckin’ skate, you!”

“Don’t get het up, Deacon,” said Tweezy, quietly. “Now, suh, would you consider a fox-trot, an’ single-foot, an’ rack, an’ pace, an’ amble, distinctions not worth distinguishin’? I assuah you, gentlemen, there was a time befo’ I was afflicted in my hip, if you’ll pardon me, Miss Tuck, when I was quite celebrated in Paduky for all those gaits; an in my opinion the Deacon’s co’rect when he says that a ho’se of any position in society gets his gaits by his haid, an’ not by—his, ah, limbs, Miss Tuck. I reckon I’m very little good now, but I’m rememberin’ the things I used to do befo’ I took to transpo’tin’ real estate with the help an’ assistance of this gentleman here.” He looked at Muldoon.

“Invijjus arterficial hind legs !” said the ex-carhorse, with a grunt of contempt. “On de Belt Line we don’t reckon no horse wuth his keep ’less he kin switch de car off de track, run her round on de cobbles, an’ dump her in ag’in ahead o’ de truck what’s blockin’ him. Dere is a way o’ swingin’ yer quarters when de driver says, ‘Yank her out, boys!’ dat takes a year to learn. Onct yer git onter it, youse kin yank a cable-car outer a manhole. I don’t advertise myself for no circus-horse, but I knew dat trick better than most, an’ dey was good to me in de stables, fer I saved time on de Belt—an’ time’s what dey hunt in N’ York.”

“But the simple child o’ nature—” the yellow horse began.

“Oh, go an’ unscrew yer splints! You’re talkin’ through yer bandages,” said Muldoon, with a horse-laugh. “Dere ain’t no loose-box for de simple child o’ nature on de Belt Line, wid de Paris comin’ in an’ de Teutonic goin’ out, an’ de trucks an’ de coupé’s sayin’ things, an’ de heavy freight movin’ down fer de Boston boat ’bout t’ree o’clock of an August afternoon, in de middle of a hot wave when de fat Kanucks an’ Western horses drops dead on de block. De simple child o’ nature had better chase himself inter de water. Every man at de end of his lines is mad or loaded or silly, an’ de cop’s madder an’ loadeder an’ sillier than de rest. Dey all take it outer de horses. Dere’s no wavin’ brooks ner ripplin’ grass on de Belt Line. Run her out on de cobbles wid de sparks flyin’, an’ stop when de cop slugs you on de bone o’ yer nose. Dat’s N’York; see?

“I was always told s’ciety in Noo York was dreffle refined an’ high-toned,” said Tuck. “We’re lookin’ to go there one o’ these days, Nip an’ me.”

“Oh, you won’t see no Belt business where you’ll go, miss. De man dat wants you’ll want bad, an’ he’ll summer you on Long Island er at Newport, wid a winky-pinky silver harness an’ an English coachman. You’ll make a star-hitch, you an’ yer brother, miss. But I guess you won’t have no nice smooth bar bit. Dey checks ’em, an’ dey bangs deir tails, an’ dey bits ’em, de city folk, an’ dey says it’s English, ye know, an’ dey darsen’t cut a horse loose ’ca’se o’ de cops. N’ York’s no place fer a horse, ’less he’s on de Belt, an’ can go round wid de boys. Wisht I was in de Fire Department!”

“But did you never stop to consider the degradin’ servitood of it all?” said the yellow horse.

“You don’t stop on de Belt, cully. You’re stopped. An’ we was all in de servitood business, man an’ horse, an’ Jimmy dat sold de papers. Guess de passengers weren’t out to grass neither, by de way dey acted. I done my turn, an’ I’m none o’ Barnum’s crowd; but any horse dat’s worked on de Belt four years don’t train wid no simple child o’ nature—not by de whole length o’ N’ York.”

“But can it be possible that with your experience, and at your time of life, you do not believe that all horses are free and equal?” said the yellow horse.

“Not till they’re dead,” Muldoon answered quietly. “An’ den it depends on de gross total o’ buttons an’ mucilage dey gits outer youse at Barren Island.”

“They tell me you’re a prominent philosopher.” The yellow horse turned to Marcus. “Can you deny a basic and pivotal statement such as this?”

“I don’t deny anythin’,” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, cautiously; “but ef you ast me, I should say ’twuz more different sorts o’ clipped oats of a lie than anythin’ I’ve had my teeth into sence I wuz foaled.”

“Are you a horse?” said the yellow horse.

“Them that knows me best ’low I am.”

“Ain’t I a horse?”

“Yep; one kind of”

“Then ain’t you an’ me equal?”

“How fer kin you go in a day to a loaded buggy, drawin’ five hundred pounds?” Marcus asked carelessly.

“That has nothing to do with the case,” the yellow horse answered excitedly.

“There’s nothing I know hez more to do with the case,” Marcus replied.

“Kin ye yank a full car outer de tracks ten times in de mornin’?” said Muldoon.

“Kin ye go to Keene—forty-two mile in an afternoon—with a mate,” said Rick; “an’ turn out bright an’ early next mornin’?”

“Was there evah any time in your careah, suh—I am not referrin’ to the present circumstances, but our mutual glorious past—when you could carry a pretty girl to market hahnsome, an’ let her knit all the way on account o’ the smoothness o’ the motion?” said Tweezy.

“Kin you keep your feet through the West River Bridge, with the narrer-gage comin’ in on one side, an’ the Montreal flyer the other, an’ the old bridge teeterin’ between?” said the Deacon. “Kin you put your nose down on the cow-catcher of a locomotive when you’re waitin’ at the depot an’ let ’em play ‘Curfew shall not ring tonight’ with the big brass bell?”

page 5

“Kin you hold back when the brichin’ breaks? Kin you stop fer orders when your nigh hind leg’s over your trace an’ ye feel good of a frosty mornin’?” said Nip, who had only learned that trick last winter, and thought it was the crown of horsely knowledge.

“What’s the use o’ talk in’?” said Tedda Gabler, scornfully. “What kin ye do?”

“I rely on my simple rights—the inalienable rights o’ my unfettered horsehood. An’ I am proud to say I have never, since my first shoes, lowered myself to obeyin’ the will o’ man.”

“’Must ha’ had a heap o’ whips broke over yer yaller back,” said Tedda. “Hev ye found it paid any?”

“Sorrer has been my portion since the day I was foaled. Blows an’ boots an’ whips an’ insults—injury, outrage, an’ oppression. I would not endoor the degradin’ badges o’ servitood that connect us with the buggy an’ the farm-wagon.”

“It’s amazin’ difficult to draw a buggy ’thout traces er collar er breast-strap er somefin’,” said Marcus. “A Power-machine for sawin’ wood is most the only thing there’s no straps to. I’ve helped saw ‘s much as three cord in an afternoon in a Power-machine. Slep’, too, most o’ the time, I did; but ’tain’t half as interestin’ ez goin’ daown-taown in the Concord.”

“Concord don’t hender you goin’ to sleep any,” said Nip. “My throat-lash! D’you remember when you lay down in the sharves last week, waitin’ at the piazza?

“Pshaw! That didn’t hurt the sharves. They wuz good an’ wide, an’ I lay down keerful. The folks kep’ me hitched up nigh an hour ’fore they started; an’ larfed—why, they all but lay down themselves with larfin’. Say, Boney, if you’ve got to be hitched to anything that goes on wheels, you’ve got to be hitched with somefin’.”

“Go an’ jine a circus,” said Muldoon, “an’ walk on your hind legs. All de horses dat knows too much to work [he pronounced it “woik,” New York fashion] jine de circus.”

“I am not sayin’ anythin’ again’ work,” said the yellow horse; “work is the finest thing in the world.”

“’Seems too fine fer some of us,” Tedda snorted.

“I only ask that each horse should work for himself, an’ enjoy the profit of his labours. Let him work intelligently, an’ not as a machine.”

“There ain’t no horse that works like a machine,” Marcus began.

“There’s no way o’ workin’ that doesn’t mean goin’ to pole er single—they never put me in the Power-machine—er under saddle,” said Rick.

“Oh, shucks! We’re talkin’ same ez we graze,” said Nip, “raound an’ raound in circles Rod, we hain’t heard from you yet, an’ you’ve more know-how than any span here.”

Rod, the off-horse of the pair, had been standing with one hip lifted, like a tired cow; and you could only tell by the quick flutter of the haw across his eye, from time to time, that he was paying any attention to the argument. He thrust his jaw out sidewise, as his habit is when he pulls, and changed his leg. His voice was hard and heavy, and his ears were close to his big, plain Hambletonian head.

“How old are you?” he said to the yellow horse.

“Nigh thirteen, I guess.”

“Mean age; ugly age; I’m gettin’ that way myself. How long hev ye been pawin’ this firefanged stable-litter?”

“If you mean my principles, I’ve held ’em sence I was three.”

“Mean age; ugly age; teeth give heaps o’ trouble then. ’Set a colt to actin’ crazy fer a while. You’ve kep’ it up, seemin’ly. D’ye talk much to your neighbours fer a steady thing?”

“I uphold the principles o’ the Cause wherever I am pastured.”

“’Done a heap o’ good, I guess?”

“I am proud to say I have taught a few of my companions the principles o’ freedom an’ liberty.”

“Meanin’ they ran away er kicked when they got the chanst?”

“I was talkin’ in the abstrac’, an’ not in the concrete. My teachin’s educated them.”

“What a horse, specially a young horse, hears in the abstrac’, he’s liable to do in the Concord. You was handled late, I presoom.”

“Four, risin’ five.”

“That’s where the trouble began. Driv’ by a woman, like ez not—eh?”

“Not fer long,” said the yellow horse, with a snap of his teeth.

“Spilled her?”

“I heerd she never drove again.”

“Any childern?”

“Buckboards full of ’em.”

“Men too?”

“I have shed conside’ble men in my time.”

“By kickin’?”

“Any way that come along. Fallin’ back over the dash is as handy as most.”

page 6

“They must be turr’ble afraid o’ you daowntaown?”

“They’ve sent me here to get rid o’ me. I guess they spend their time talkin’ over my campaigns.”

“I wanter know!”

“Yes, sir. Now, all you gentlemen have asked me what I can do. I’ll just show you. See them two fellers lyin’ down by the buggy?”

“Yep; one of ’em owns me. T’other broke me,” said Rod.

“Get ’em out here in the open, an’ I’ll show you something. Lemme hide back o’ you peoples, so ‘s they won’t see what I’m at.”

“Meanin’ ter kill ’em?” Rod drawled. There was a shudder of horror through the others; but the yellow horse never noticed.

“I’ll catch ’em by the back o’ the neck, an’ pile-drive ’em a piece. They can suit ’emselves about livin’ when I’m through with ’em.”

“’Shouldn’t wonder ef they did,” said Rod. The yellow horse had hidden himself very cleverly behind the others as they stood in a group, and was swaying his head close to the ground with a curious scythe-like motion, looking side-wise out of his wicked eyes. You can never mistake a man-eater getting ready to knock a man down. We had had one to pasture the year before.

“See that?” said my companion, turning over on the pine-needles. “Nice for a woman walking ’cross lots, wouldn’t it be?”

“Bring ’em out!” said the yellow horse, hunching his sharp back. “There’s no chance among them tall trees. Bring out the—oh! Ouch!”

It was a right-and-left kick from Muldoon. I had no idea that the old car-horse could lift so quickly. Both blows caught the yellow horse full and fair in the ribs, and knocked the breath out of him.

“What’s that for?” he said angrily, when he recovered himself; but I noticed he did not draw any nearer to Muldoon than was necessary.

Muldoon never answered, but discoursed to himself in the whining grunt that he uses when he is going down-hill in front of a heavy load. We call it singing; but I think it’s something much worse, really. The yellow horse blustered and squealed a little, and at last said that, if it was a horse-fly that had stung Muldoon, he would accept an apology.

“You’ll get it,” said Muldoon, “in de sweet by-and-bye—all de apology you’ve any use for. Excuse me interruptin’ you, Mr. Rod, but I’m like Tweezy—I’ve a Southern drawback in me hind legs.”

“Naow, I want you all here to take notice, an’ you’ll learn something,” Rod went on. “This yaller-backed skate comes to our pastur’—”

“Not havin’ paid his board,” put in Tedda.

“Not havin’ earned his board, an’ talks smooth to us abaout ripplin’ brooks an’ wavin’ grass, an’ his high-toned, pure-souled horsehood, which don’t hender him sheddin’ women an’ childern, an’ fallin’ over the dash onter men. You heard his talk, an’ you thought it mighty fine, some o’ you.”

Tuck looked guilty here, but she did not say anything.

“Bit by bit he goes on ez you have heard.”

“I was talkin’ in the abstrac’,” said the yellow horse, in an altered voice.

“Abstrac’ be switched! Ez I’ve said, it’s this yer blamed abstrac’ business that makes the young uns cut up in the Concord; an’ abstrac’ or no abstrac’, he crep’ on an’ on till he come to killin’ plain an’ straight—killin’ them as never done him no harm, jest beca’se they owned horses.”

“An’ knowed how to manage ’em,” said Tedda. “That makes it worse.”

“Waal, he didn’t kill ’em, anyway,” said Marcus. “He’d ha’ been half killed ef he had tried.”

“’Makes no differ,” Rod answered. “He meant to; an’ ef he hadn’t—s’pose we want the Back Pasture turned into a biffin’-ground on our only day er rest? ’S’pose we want our men walkin’ round with bits er lead pipe an’ a twitch, an’ their hands full o’ stones to throw at us, same ’s if we wuz hogs er hooky keows? More’n that, leavin’ out Tedda here—an’ I guess it’s more her maouth than her manners stands in her light—there ain’t a horse on this farm that ain’t a woman’s horse, an’ proud of it. An’ this yer bogspavined Kansas sunflower goes up an’ daown the length o’ the country, traded off an’ traded on, boastin’ as he’s shed women —an’ childern. I don’t say as a woman in a buggy ain’t a fool. I don’t say as she ain’t the lastin’est kind er fool, ner I don’t say a child ain’t worse—spattin’ the lines an’ standin’ up an’ hollerin’—but I do say, ’tain’t none of our business to shed ’em daown the road.”

“We don’t,” said the Deacon. “The baby tried to git some o’ my tail for a sooveneer last fall when I was up to the haouse, an’ I didn’t kick. Boney’s talk ain’t goin’ to hurt us any. We ain’t colts.”

“Thet’s what you think by’n’by you git into a tight corner, ’Lection day er Valley Fair, like ’s not, daown-taown, when you’re all het an’ lathery, an’ pestered with flies, an’ thirsty, an’ sick o’ bein’ worked in an aout ’tween buggies. Then somethin’ whispers inside o’ your winkers, bringin’ up all that talk abaout servitood an’ inalienable truck an’ sech like, an’ jest then a Militia gun goes off; er your wheels hit, an’—waal, you’re only another horse ez can’t be trusted. I’ve been there time an’ again. Boys—fer I’ve seen you all bought er broke—on my solemn repitation fer a three-minute clip, I ain’t givin’ you no bran-mash o’ my own fixin’. I’m tellin’ you my experiences, an’ I’ve had ez heavy a load an’ ez high a check ’s any horse here. I wuz born with a splint on my near fore ez big ‘s a walnut, an’ the cussed, three-cornered Hambletonian temper that sours up an’ curdles daown ez you git older. I’ve favoured my splint; even little Rick he don’t know what it’s cost me to keep my end up sometimes; an’ I’ve fit my temper in stall an’ harness, hitched up an’ at pasture, till the sweat trickled off my hooves, an’ they thought I wuz off condition, an’ drenched me.”

page 7

“When my affliction came,” said Tweezy, gently, “I was very near to losin’ my manners. Allow me to extend to you my sympathy, suh.”

Rick said nothing, but he looked at Rod curiously. Rick is a sunny-tempered child who never bears malice, and I don’t think he quite understood. He gets his temper from his mother, as a horse should.

“I’ve been there too, Rod,” said Tedda. “Open confession’s good for the soul, an’ all Monroe County knows I’ve had my experiences.”

“But if you will excuse me, suh, that pusson”—Tweezy looked unspeakable things aat the yellow horse—“that pusson who has insulted our intelligences comes from Kansas. An’ what a ho’se of his position, an’ Kansas at that, says cannot, by any stretch of the halter, concern gentlemen of our position. There’s no shadow of equal’ty, suh, not even for one kick. He’s beneath our contempt.”

“Let him talk,” said Marcus. “It’s always interestin’ to know what another horse thinks. It don’t tech us.”

“An’ he talks so, too,” said Tuck. “I’ve never heard anythin’ so smart for a long time.”

Again Rod stuck out his jaws sidewise, and went on slowly, as though he were slugging on a plain bit at the end of a thirty-mile drive:

“I want all you here ter understand thet ther ain’t no Kansas, ner no Kentucky, ner yet no Vermont, in our business. There’s jest two kind o’ horse in the United States—them ez can an’ will do their work after bein’ properly broke an’ handled, an’ them as won’t. I’m sick an’ tired o’ this everlastin’ tail-switchin’ an’ wickerin’ abaout one State er another. A horse kin be proud o’ his State, an’ swap lies abaout it in stall or when he’s hitched to a block, ef he keers to put in fly-time that way; but he hain’t no right to let that pride o’ hisn interfere with his work, ner to make it an excuse fer claimin’ he’s different. That’s colts’ talk, an’ don’t you fergit it, Tweezy. An’, Marcus,you remember that hem’ a philosopher, an’ anxious to save trouble,—fer you are,—don’t excuse you from jumpin’ with all your feet on a slack-jawed, crazy clay-bank like Boney here. It’s leavin’ ’em alone that gives ’em their chance to ruin colts an’ kill folks. An’, Tuck, waal, you’re a mare anyways—but when a horse comes along an’ covers up all his talk o’ killin’ with ripplin’ brooks, an wavin grass, an’ eight quarts of oats a day free, after killn’ his man, don’t you be run away with by his yap. You’re too young an’ too nervous.”

“I’ll—I’ll have nervous prostration sure ef there’s a fight here,” said Tuck, who saw what was in Rod’s eye; “I’m—I’m that sympathetic I’d run away clear to next caounty.”

“Yep; I know that kind o’ sympathy. Jest lasts long enough to start a fuss, an’ then lights aout to make new trouble. I hain’t been ten years in harness fer nuthin’. Naow, we’re goin’ to keep school with Boney fer a spell.”

“Say, look a-here, you ain’t goin’ to hurt me, are you? Remember, I belong to a man in town,” cried the yellow horse, uneasily. Muldoon kept behind him so that he could not run away.

“I know it. There must be some pore delooded fool in this State hez a right to the loose end o’ your hitchin’-strap. I’m blame sorry fer him, but he shall hev his rights when we’re through with you,” said Rod.

“If it’s all the same, gentlemen, I’d ruther change pasture. ’Guess I’ll do it now.”

“’Can’t always have your ’druthers. ’Guess you won’t,” said Rod.

“But look a-here. All of you ain’t so blame unfriendly to a stranger. S’pose we count noses.”

“What in Vermont fer?” said Rod, putting up his eyebrows. The idea of settling a question by counting noses is the very last thing that ever enters the head of a well-broken horse.

“To see how many’s on my side. Here’s Miss Tuck, anyway; an’ Colonel Tweezy yonder’s neutral; an’ Judge Marcus, an’ I guess the Reverend [the yellow horse meant the Deacon] might see that I had my rights. He’s the likeliest-lookin’ Trotter I’ve ever set eyes on. Pshaw. Boys. You ain’t goin’ to pound me, be you? Why, we’ve gone round in pasture, all colts together, this month o’ Sundays, hain’t we, as friendly as could be. There ain’t a horse alive—I don’t care who he is—has a higher opinion o’ you, Mr. Rod, than I have. Let’s do it fair an’ true an’ above the exe. Let’s count noses same ‘s they do in Kansas.” Here he dropped his voice a little and turned to Marcus: “Say, Judge, there’s some green food I know, back o’ the brook, no one hain’t touched yet. After this little fracas is fixed up, you an’ me’ll make up a party an’ ’tend to it.”

Marcus did not answer for a long time, then he said: “There’s a pup up to the haouse ’bout eight weeks old. He’ll yap till he gits a lickin’, an’ when he sees it comin’ he lies on his back, an’ yowls. But he don’t go through no cirkituous nose-countin’ first. I’ve seen a noo light sence Rod spoke. You’ll better stand up to what’s served. I’m goin’ to philosophise all over your carcass.”

“I’m goin’ to do yer up in brown paper,” said Muldoon. “I can fit you on apologies.”

“Hold on. Ef we all biffed you now, these same men you’ve been so dead anxious to kill ’u’d call us off. ’Guess we’ll wait till they go back to the haouse, an’ you’ll have time to think cool an’ quiet,” said Rod.

“Have you no respec’ whatever fer the dignity o’ our common horsehood?” the yellow horse squealed.

“Nary respec’ onless the horse kin do something. America’s paved with the kind er horse you are—jist plain yaller-dog horse—waitin’ ter be whipped inter shape. We call ’em yearlings an’ colts when they’re young. When they’re aged we pound ’em—in this pastur’. Horse, sonny, is what you start from. We know all about horse here, an’ he ain’t any high-toned, pure souled child o’ nature. Horse, plain horse, same ez you, is chock-full o’ tricks, an’ meannesses, an’ cussednesses, an’ shirkin’s, an’ monkey-shines, which he’s took over from his sire an’ his dam, an’ thickened up with his own special fancy in the way o’ goin’ crooked. Thet’s horse, an’ thet’s about his dignity an’ the size of his soul ’fore he’s been broke an’ rawhided a piece. Now we ain’t goin’ to give ornery unswitched horse, that hain’t done nawthin’ wuth a quart of oats sence he wuz foaled, pet names that would be good enough fer Nancy Hanks, or Alix, or Directum, who hev. Don’t you try to back off acrost them rocks. Wait where you are! Ef I let my Hambletonian temper git the better o’ me I’d frazzle you out finer than rye-straw inside o’ three minutes, you woman-scarin’, kid-killin’, dash-breakin’, unbroke, unshod, ungaited, pastur’-hoggin’, saw-backed, shark-mouthed, hair-trunk-thrown-in-in-trade son of a bronco an’ a sewin’-machine!”

“I think we’d better get home,” I said to my companion, when Rod had finished; and we climbed into the coupé, Tedda whinnying, as we bumped over the ledges: “Well, I’m dreffle sorry I can’t stay fer the sociable; but I hope an’ trust my friends’ll take a ticket fer me.”

“Bet your natchul!” said Muldoon, cheerfully, and the horses scattered before us, trotting into the ravine.

Next morning we sent back to the livery-stable what was left of the yellow horse. It seemed tired, but anxious to go.

(The Kipling Society presents here Kipling’s work as he
wrote it, but wishes to alert readers that the text below
contains some derogatory and/or offensive language)

page 1 of 10

ISN’T it almost time that our Planet took some interest in the proceedings of the Aerial Board of Control? One knows that easy communications nowadays, and lack of privacy in the past, have killed all curiosity among mankind, but as the Board’s Official Reporter I am bound to tell my tale. At 9.30 a.m., August 26, a.d. 2065, the Board, sitting in London, was informed by De Forest that the District of Northern Illinois had riotously cut itself out of all systems and would remain disconnected till the Board should take over and administer it direct.

Every Northern Illinois freight and passenger tower was, he reported, out of action; all District main, local, and guiding lights had been extinguished; all General Communications were dumb, and through traffic had been diverted. No reason had been given, but he gathered unofficially from the Mayor of Chicago that the District complained of ‘crowd-making and invasion of privacy.’

As a matter of fact, it is of no importance whether Northern Illinois stay in or out of planetary circuit; as a matter of policy, any complaint of invasion of privacy needs immediate investigation, lest worse follow.

By 9.45 a.m. De Forest, Dragomiroff (Russia), Takahira (Japan), and Pirolo (Italy) were empowered to visit Illinois and ‘to take such steps as might be necessary for the resumption of traffic and all that that implies.’ By 10 a.m. the Hall was empty, and the four Members and I were aboard what Pirolo insisted on calling ‘my leetle godchild’—that is to say, the new Victor Pirolo. Our Planet prefers to know Victor Pirolo as a gentle, grey-haired enthusiast who spends his time near Foggia, inventing or creating new breeds of Spanish-Italian olive-trees; but there is another side to his nature—the manufacture of quaint inventions, of which the Victor Pirolo is perhaps, not the least surprising. She and a few score sister-craft of the same type embody his latest ideas. But she is not comfortable. An A.B.C. boat does not take the air with the level-keeled lift of a liner, but shoots up rocket-fashion like the ‘aeroplane’ of our ancestors, and makes her height at top-speed from the first. That is why I found myself sitting suddenly on the large lap of Eustace Arnott, who commands the A.B.C. Fleet. One knows vaguely that there is such a thing as a Fleet somewhere on the Planet, and that, theoretically, it exists for the purposes of what used to be known as ‘war.’ Only a week before, while visiting a glacier sanatorium behind Gothaven, I had seen some squadrons making false auroras far to the north while they manoeuvred round the Pole; but, naturally, it had never occurred to me that the things could be used in earnest.

Said Arnott to De Forest as I staggered to a seat on the chart-room divan: ‘We’re tremendously grateful to ’em in Illinois. We’ve never had a chance of exercising all the Fleet together. I’ve turned in a General Call, and I expect we’ll have at least two hundred keels aloft this evening.’

‘Well aloft?’ De Forest asked.

‘Of course, sir. Out of sight till they’re called for.’

Arnott laughed as he lolled over the transparent chart-table where the map of the summer-blue Atlantic slid along, degree by degree, in exact answer to our progress. Our dial already showed 320 m.p.h. and we were two thousand feet above the uppermost traffic lines.

‘Now, where is this Illinois District of yours?’ said Dragomiroff. ‘One travels so much, one sees so little. Oh, I remember! It is in North America.’

De Forest, whose business it is to know the out districts, told us that it lay at the foot of Lake Michigan, on a road to nowhere in particular, was about half an hour’s run from end to end, and, except in one corner, as flat as the sea. Like most flat countries nowadays, it was heavily guarded against invasion of privacy by forced timber—fifty-foot spruce and tamarack, grown in five years. The population was close on two millions, largely migratory between Florida and California, with a backbone of small farms (they call a thousand acres a farm in Illinois) whose owners come into Chicago for amusements and society during the winter. They were, he said noticeably kind, quiet folk, but a little exacting, as all flat countries must be, in their notions of privacy. There had, for instance, been no printed news-sheet in Illinois for twenty-seven years. Chicago argued that engines for printed news sooner or later developed into engines for invasion of privacy, which in turn might bring the old terror of Crowds and blackmail back to the Planet. So news-sheets were not.

‘And that’s Illinois,’ De Forest concluded. ‘You see, in the Old Days, she was in the fore-front of what they used to call “progress,” and Chicago——’

‘Chicago?’ said Takahira. ‘That’s the little place where there is Salati’s Statue of the Nigger in Flames. A fine bit of old work.’

‘When did you see it ?’ asked De Forest quickly. ‘They only unveil it once a year.’

‘I know. At Thanksgiving. It was then,’ said Takahira, with a shudder. ‘ And they sang MacDonough’s Song, too.’

‘Whew!’ De Forest whistled. ‘I did not know that! I wish you’d told me before. MacDonough’s Song may have had its uses when it was composed, but it was an infernal legacy for any man to leave behind.’

‘It’s protective instinct, my dear fellows,’ said Pirolo, rolling a cigarette. ‘The Planet, she has had her dose of popular government. She suffers from inherited agoraphobia. She has no—ah—use for crowds.’

Dragomiroff leaned forward to give him a light. ‘Certainly,’ said the white-bearded Russian, ‘the Planet has taken all precautions against crowds for the past hundred years. What is our total population today? Six hundred million, we hope; five hundred, we think; but—but if next year’s census shows more than four hundred and fifty, I myself will eat all the extra little babies. We have cut the birth-rate out—right out! For a long time we have said to Almighty God, “Thank You, Sir, but we do not much like Your game of life, so we will not play.”’

‘Anyhow,’ said Arnott defiantly, ‘men live a century apiece on the average now.’

‘Oh, that is quite well! I am rich—you are rich—we are all rich and happy because we are so few and we live so long. Only I think Almighty God He will remember what the Planet was like in the time of Crowds and the Plague. Perhaps He will send us nerves. Eh, Pirolo’

The Italian blinked into space. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘He has sent them already. Anyhow, you cannot argue with the Planet. She does not forget the Old Days, and—what can you do?’

‘For sure we can’t remake the world.’ De Forest glanced at the map flowing smoothly across the table from west to east. ‘We ought to be over our ground by nine to-night. There won’t be much sleep afterwards.’

On which hint we dispersed, and I slept till Takahira waked me for dinner. Our ancestors thought nine hours’ sleep ample for their little lives. We, living thirty years longer, feel ourselves defrauded with less than eleven out of the twenty-four.

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By ten o’clock we were over Lake Michigan. The west shore was lightless, except for a dull ground-glare at Chicago, and a single traffic-directing light—its leading beam pointing north—at Waukegan on our starboard bow. None of the Lake villages gave any sign of life; and inland, westward, so far as we could see, blackness lay unbroken on the level earth. We swooped down and skimmed low across the dark, throwing calls county by county. Now and again we picked up the faint glimmer of a house-light, or heard the rasp and rend of a cultivator being played across the fields, but Northern Illinois as a whole was one inky, apparently uninhabited, waste of high, forced woods. Only our illuminated map, with its little pointer switching from county to county, as we wheeled and twisted, gave us any idea of our position. Our calls, urgent, pleading, coaxing or commanding, through the General Communicator brought no answer. Illinois strictly maintained her own privacy in the timber which she grew for that purpose.

‘Oh, this is absurd! ‘ said De Forest. ‘We’re like an owl trying to work a wheat-field. Is this Bureau Creek? Let’s land, Arnott, and get hold of someone.’

We brushed over a belt of forced woodland—fifteen-year-old maple sixty feet high—grounded on a private meadow-dock, none too big, where we moored to our own grapnels, and hurried out through the warm dark night towards a light in a verandah. As we neared the garden gate I could have sworn we had stepped knee-deep in quicksand, for we could scarcely drag our feet against the prickling currents that clogged them. After five paces we stopped, wiping our foreheads, as hopelessly stuck on dry smooth turf as so many cows in a bog.

‘Pest!’ cried Pirolo angrily. We are ground-circuited. And it is my own system of ground-circuits too! I know the pull.’

‘Good evening,’ said a girl’s voice from the verandah. ‘Oh, I’m sorry! We’ve locked up. Wait a minute.’

We heard the click of a switch, and almost fell forward as the currents round our knees were withdrawn.

The girl laughed, and laid aside her knitting. An old-fashioned Controller stood at her elbow, which she reversed from time to time, and we could hear the snort and clank of the obedient cultivator half a mile away, behind the guardian woods.

‘Come in and sit down,’ she said. ‘I’m only playing a plough. Dad’s gone to Chicago to—Ah! Then it was your call I heard just now!’

She had caught sight of Arnott’s Board uniform, leaped to the switch, and turned it full on.

We were checked, gasping, waist-deep in current this time, three yards from the verandah.

‘We only want to know what’s the matter with Illinois,’ said De Forest placidly.

‘Then hadn’t you better go to Chicago and find out?’ she answered. ‘There’s nothing wrong here. We own ourselves.’

‘How can we go anywhere if you won’t loose us?’ De Forest went on, while Arnott scowled. Admirals of Fleets are still quite human when their dignity is touched.

‘Stop a minute—you don’t know how funny you look!’ She put her hands on her hips and laughed mercilessly.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Arnott, and whistled. A voice answered from the Victor Pirolo in the meadow.

‘Only a single-fuse ground-circuit!’ Arnott called. ‘Sort it out gently, please.’

We heard the ping of a breaking lamp; a fuse blew out somewhere in the verandah roof, frightening a nest full of birds. The groud-circuit was open. We stooped and rubbed our tingling ankles.

‘How rude—how very rude of you!’ the maiden cried.

‘’Sorry, but we haven’t time to look funny,’ said Arnott. ‘We’ve got to go to Chicago; and if I were you, young lady, I’d go into the cellars for the next two hours, and take mother with me.’

Off he strode, with us at his heels, muttering indignantly, till the humour of the thing struck and doubled him up with laughter at the foot of the gangway ladder.

‘The Board hasn’t shown what you might call a fat spark on this occasion,’ said De Forest, wiping his eyes. ‘I hope I didn’t look as big a fool as you did, Arnott! Hullo! What on earth is that? Dad coming home from Chicago?’

There was a rattle and a rush, and a five-plough cultivator, blades in air like so many teeth, trundled itself at us round the edge of the timber, fuming and sparking furiously.

‘Jump!’ said Arnott, as we hurled ourselves through the none-too-wide door. ‘Never mind about shutting it. Up!’

The Victor Pirolo lifted like a bubble, and the vicious machine shot just underneath us, clawing high as it passed.

‘There’s a nice little spit-kitten for you!’ said Arnott, dusting his knees. ‘We ask her a civil question. First she circuits us and then she plays a cultivator at us!’

‘And then we fly,’ said Dragomirof. ‘If I were forty years more young, I would go back and kiss her. Ho! Ho!’

‘I,’ said Pirolo, ‘would smack her! My pet ship has been chased by a dirty plough; a—how do you say?—agricultural implement.’

‘Oh, that is Illinois all over,’ said De Forest. ‘They don’t content themselves with talking about privacy. They arrange to have it. And now, where’s your alleged fleet, Arnott? We must assert ourselves against this wench.’

Arnott pointed to the black heavens. ‘Waiting on—up there,’ said he. ‘Shall I give them the whole installation, sir?’

‘Oh, I don’t think the young lady is quite worth that,’ said De Forest. ‘Get over Chicago, and perhaps we’ll see something.’

In a few minutes we were hanging at two thousand feet over an oblong block of incandescence in the centre of the little town.

‘That looks like the old City Hall. Yes, there’s Salati’s Statue in front of it,’ said Takahira.

‘But what on earth are they doing to the place? I thought they used it for a market nowadays! Drop a little, please.’

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We could hear the sputter and crackle of road-surfacing machines—the cheap Western type which fuse stone and rubbish into lava-like ribbed glass for their rough country roads. Three or four surfacers worked on each side of a square of ruins. The brick and stone wreckage crumbled, slid forward, and presently spread out into white-hot pools of sticky slag, which the levelling-rods smoothed more or less flat. Already a third of the big block had been so treated, and was cooling to dull red before our astonished eyes.

‘It is the Old Market,’ said De Forest. ‘Well, there’s nothing to prevent Illinois from making a road through a market. It doesn’t interfere with traffic, that I can see.’

‘Hsh!’ said Arnott, gripping me by the shoulder. ‘Listen! They’re singing. Why on the earth are they singing?’

We dropped again till we could see the black fringe of people at the edge of that glowing square.

At first they only roared against the roar of the surfacers and levellers. Then the words came up clearly—the words of the Forbidden Song that all men knew, and none let pass their lips—poor Pat MacDonough’s Song, made in the days of the Crowds and the Plague—every silly word of it loaded to sparking-point with the Planet’s inherited memories of horror, panic, fear and cruelty. And Chicago—innocent, contented little Chicago—was singing it aloud to the infernal tune that carried riot, pestilence and lunacy round our Planet a few generations ago!

(Then the stamp and pause):

The levellers thrust in savagely against the ruins as the song renewed itself again, again and again, louder than the crash of the melting walls.

De Forest frowned.

‘I don’t like that,’ he said. ‘They’ve broken back to the Old Days! They’ll be killing somebody soon. I think we’d better divert ’em, Arnott.’

‘Ay, ay, sir.’ Arnott’s hand went to his cap, and we heard the hull of the Victor Pirolo ring to the command: ‘Lamps! Both watches stand by! Lamps! Lamps! Lamps!’

‘Keep still!’ Takahira whispered to me. ‘Blinkers, please, quartermaster.’

‘It’s all right—all right!’ said Pirolo from behind, and to my horror slipped over my head some sort of rubber helmet that locked with a snap. I could feel thick colloid bosses before my eyes, but I stood in absolute darkness.

‘To save the sight,’ he explained, and pushed me on to the chart-room divan. ‘You will see in a minute.’

As he spoke I became aware of a thin thread of almost intolerable light, let down from heaven at an immense distance—one vertical hairs breadth of frozen lightning.

‘Those are our flanking ships,’ said Arnott at my elbow. ‘That one is over Galena. Look south—that other one’s over Keithburg. Vincennes is behind us, and north yonder is Winthrop Woods. The Fleet’s in position, sir’—this to De Forest. ‘As soon as you give the word.’

‘Ah no! No!’ cried Dragomiroff at my side. I could feel the old man tremble. ‘I do not know all that you can do, but be kind! I ask you to be a little kind to them below! This is horrible horrible!’

Takahira quoted. ‘It is too late to be gentle now.’

‘Then take off my helmet! Take off my helmet!’ Dragomiroff began hysterically.

Pirolo must have put his arm round him.

‘Hush,’ he said, ‘I am here. It is all right, Ivan, my dear fellow.’

‘I’ll just send our little girl in Bureau County a warning,’ said Arnott. ‘She don’t deserve it, but we’ll allow her a minute or two to take mamma to the cellar.’

In the utter hush that followed the growling spark after Arnott had linked up his Service Communicator with the invisible Fleet, we heard MacDonough’s Song from the city beneath us grow fainter as we rose to position. Then I clapped my hand before my mask lenses, for it was as though the floor of Heaven had been riddled and all the inconceivable blaze of suns in the making was poured through the manholes.

‘You needn’t count,’ said Arnott. I had had no thought of such a thing. ‘There are two hundred and fifty keels up there, five miles apart. Full power, please, for another twelve seconds.’

The firmament, as far as eye could reach, stood on pillars of white fire. One fell on the glowing square at Chicago, and turned it black.

‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Can men be allowed to do such things?’ Dragomiroff cried, and fell across our knees.

‘Glass of water, please,’ said Takahira to a helmeted shape that leaped forward. ‘He is a little faint.’

The lights switched off, and the darkness stunned like an avalanche. We could hear Dragomiroff’s teeth on the glass edge.

Pirolo was comforting him.

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‘All right, all ra-ight,’ he repeated. ‘Come and lie down. Come below and take off your mask. I give you my word, old friend, it is all right. They are my siege-lights. Little Victor Pirolo’s leetle lights. You know me! I do not hurt people.’

‘Pardon!’ Dragomiroff moaned. ‘I have never seen Death. I have never seen the Board take action. Shall we go down and burn them alive, or is that already done?’

‘Oh, hush,’ said Pirolo, and I think he rocked him in his arms.

‘Do we repeat, sir?’ Arnott asked De Forest.

‘Give ’em a minute’s break,’ De Forest replied. ‘They may need it.’

We waited a minute, and then MacDonough’s Song, broken but defiant, rose from undefeated Chicago.

‘They seem fond of that tune,’ said De Forest. ‘I should let ’em have it, Arnott.’

‘Very good, sir,’ said Arnott, and felt his way to the Communicator keys.

No lights broke forth, but the hollow of the skies made herself the mouth for one note that touched the raw fibre of the brain. Men hear such sounds in delirium, advancing like tides from horizons beyond the ruled foreshores of space.

‘That’s our pitch-pipe,’ said Arnott. ‘We may be a bit ragged. I’ve never conducted two hundred and fifty performers before.’ He pulled out the couplers, and struck a full chord on the Service Communicators.

The beams of light leaped down again, and danced, solemnly and awfully, a stilt-dance, sweeping thirty or forty miles left and right at each stiff-legged kick, while the darkness delivered itself—there is no scale to measure against that utterance—of the tune to which they kept time. Certain notes—one learnt to expect them with terror—cut through one’s marrow, but, after three minutes, thought and emotion passed in indescribable agony.

We saw, we heard, but I think we were in some sort swooning. The two hundred and fifty beams shifted, re-formed, straddled and split, narrowed, widened, rippled in ribbons, broke into a thousand white-hot parallel lines, melted and revolved in interwoven rings like old-fashioned engine-turning, flung up to the zenith, made as if to descend and renew the torment, halted at the last instant, twizzled insanely round the horizon, and vanished, to bring back for the hundredth time darkness more shattering than their instantly renewed light over all Illinois. Then the tune and lights ceased together, and we heard one single devastating wail that shook all the horizon as a rubbed wet finger shakes the rim of a bowl.

‘Ah, that is my new siren,’ said Pirolo. ‘You can break an iceberg in half, if you find the proper pitch. They will whistle by squadrons now. It is the wind through pierced shutters in the bows.’

I had collapsed beside Dragomiroff, broken and snivelling feebly, because I had been delivered before my time to all the terrors of Judgment Day, and the Archangels of the Resurrection were hailing me naked across the Universe to the sound of the music of the spheres.

Then I saw De Forest smacking Arnott’s helmet with his open hand. The wailing died down in a long shriek as a black shadow swooped past us, and returned to her place above the lower clouds.

‘I hate to interrupt a specialist when he’s enjoying himself,’ said De Forest. ‘But, as a matter of fact, all Illinois has been asking us to stop for these last fifteen seconds.’

‘What a pity.’ Arnott slipped off his mask. ‘I wanted you to hear us really hum. Our lower C can lift street-paving.’

‘It is Hell—Hell!’ cried Dragomiroff, and sobbed aloud.

Arnott looked away as he answered: ‘It’s a few thousand volts ahead of the old shoot-’em-and-sink-’em game, but I should scarcely call it that. What shall I tell the Fleet, sir?’

‘Tell ’em we’re very pleased and impressed. I don’t think they need wait on any longer. There isn’t a spark left down there.’ De Forest pointed. ‘They’ll be deaf and blind.’

‘Oh, I think not, sir. The demonstration lasted less than ten minutes.’

‘Marvellous!’ Takahira sighed. ‘I should have said it was half a night. Now, shall we go down and pick up the pieces?’

‘But first a small drink,’ said Pirolo. ‘The Board must not arrive weeping at its own works.’

‘I am an old fool—an old fool!’ Dragomiroff began piteously. ‘I did not know what would happen. It is all new to me. We reason with them in Little Russia.’

Chicago North landing-tower was unlighted, and Arnott worked his ship into the clips by her own lights. As soon as these broke out we heard groanings of horror and appeal from many people below.

‘All right,’ shouted Arnott into the darkness. ‘We aren’t beginning again!’ We descended by the stairs, to find ourselves knee deep in a grovelling crowd, some crying that they were blind, others beseeching us not to make any more noises, but the greater part writhing face downward, their hands or their caps before their eyes.

It was Pirolo who came to our rescue. He climbed the side of a surfacing-machine, and there, gesticulating as though they could see, made oration to those afflicted people of Illinois.

‘You stchewpids!’ he began. ‘There is nothing to fuss for. Of course, your eyes will smart and be red to-morrow. You will look as if you and your wives had drunk too much, but in a little while you will see again as well as before. I tell you this, and I—I am Pirolo. Victor Pirolo!’

The crowd with one accord shuddered, for many legends attach to Victor Pirolo of Foggia, deep in the secrets of God.

‘Pirolo?’ An unsteady voice lifted itself. ‘Then tell us was there anything except light in those lights of yours just now?’

The question was repeated from every corner of the darkness.

Pirolo laughed.

page 5

‘No!’ he thundered. (Why have small men such large voices) ‘I give you my word and the Board’s word that there was nothing except light—just light! You stchewpids! Your birth-rate is too low already as it is. Some day I must invent something to send it up, but send it down—never!’

‘Is that true?—We thought—somebody said—’

One could feel the tension relax all round.

‘You too big fools,’ Pirolo cried. ‘You could have sent us a call and we would have told you.’

‘Send you a call!’ a deep voice shouted. ‘I wish you had been at our end of the wire.’

‘I’m glad I wasn’t,’ said De Forest. ‘It was bad enough from behind the lamps. Never mind! It’s over now. Is there any one here I can talk business with? I’m De Forest—for the Board.’

‘You might begin with me, for one—I’m Mayor,’ the bass voice replied.

A big man rose unsteadily from the street, and staggered towards us where we sat on the broad turf-edging, in front of the garden fences.

‘I ought to be the first on my feet. Am I?’ said he.

‘Yes,’ said De Forest, and steadied him as he dropped down beside us.

‘Hello, Andy. Is that you?’ a voice called.

‘Excuse me,’ said the Mayor; ‘that sounds like my Chief of Police, Bluthner!’

‘Bluthner it is; and here’s Mulligan and Keefe—on their feet.’

‘Bring ’em up please, Blut. We’re supposed to be the Four in charge of this hamlet. What we says, goes. And, De Forest, what do you say?’

‘Nothing—yet,’ De Forest answered, as we made room for the panting, reeling men. ‘You’ve cut out of system. Well?’

‘Tell the steward to send down drinks, please,’ Arnott whispered to an orderly at his side.

‘Good!’ said the Mayor, smacking his dry lips. ‘Now I suppose we can take it, De Forest, that henceforward the Board will administer us direct?’

‘Not if the Board can avoid it,’ De Forest laughed. ‘The A.B.C. is responsible for the planetary traffic only.’

‘And all that that implies.’ The big Four who ran Chicago chanted their Magna Charta like children at school.

‘Well, get on,’ said De Forest wearily. ‘What is your silly trouble anyway?’

‘Too much dam’ Democracy,’ said the Mayor, laying his hand on De Forest’s knee.

‘So? I thought Illinois had had her dose of that.’

‘She has. That’s why. Blut, what did you do with our prisoners last night?’

‘Locked ’em in the water-tower to prevent the women killing ’em,’ the Chief of Police replied. ‘I’m too blind to move just yet, but——’

‘Arnott, send some of your people, please, and fetch ’em along,’ said De Forest.

‘They’re triple-circuited,’ the Mayor called. ‘You’ll have to blow out three fuses.’ He turned to De Forest, his large outline just visible in the paling darkness. ‘I hate to throw any more work on the Board. I’m an administrator myself, but we’ve had a little fuss with our Serviles. What? In a big city there’s bound to be a few men and women who can’t live without listening to themselves, and who prefer drinking out of pipes they don’t own both ends of. They inhabit flats and hotels all the year round. They say it saves ’em trouble. Anyway, it gives ’em more time to make trouble for their neighbours. We call ’em Serviles locally. And they are apt to be tuberculous.’

‘Just so!’ said the man called Mulligan. ‘Transportation is Civilisation. Democracy is Disease. I’ve proved it by the blood-test, every time.’

‘Mulligan’s our Health Officer, and a one-idea man,’ said the Mayor, laughing. ‘But it’s true that most Serviles haven’t much control. They will talk; and when people take to talking as a business, anything may arrive—mayn’t it, De Forest?’

‘Anything—except the facts of the case,’ said De Forest, laughing.

‘I’ll give you those in a minute,’ said the Mayor. ‘Our Serviles got to talking—first in their houses and then on the streets, telling men and women how to manage their own affairs. (You can’t teach a Servile not to finger his neighbour’s soul.) That’s invasion of privacy, of course, but in Chicago we’ll suffer anything sooner than make crowds. Nobody took much notice, and so I let ’em alone. My fault! I was warned there would be trouble, but there hasn’t been a crowd or murder in Illinois for nineteen years.’

‘Twenty-two,’ said his Chief of Police.

‘Likely. Anyway, we’d forgot such things. So, from talking in the houses and on the streets, our Serviles go to calling a meeting at the Old Market yonder.’ He nodded across the square where the wrecked buildings heaved up grey in the dawn-glimmer behind the square-cased statue of The Negro in Flames. ‘There’s nothing to prevent anyone calling meetings except that it’s against human nature to stand in a crowd, besides being bad for the health. I ought to have known by the way our men and women attended that first meeting that trouble was brewing. There were as many as a thousand in the market-place, touching each other. Touching! Then the Serviles turned in all tongue-switches and talked, and we——’

‘What did they talk about?’ said Takahira.

‘First, how badly things were managed in the city. That pleased us Four—we were on the platform—because we hoped to catch one or two good men for City work. You know how rare executive capacity is. Even if we didn’t it’s—it’s refreshing to find any one interested enough in our job to damn our eyes. You don’t know what it means to work, year in, year out, without a spark of difference with a living soul.’

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‘Oh, don’t we!’ said De Forest. ‘There are times on the Board when we’d give our positions if any one would kick us out and take hold of things themselves.’

‘But they won’t,’ said the Mayor ruefully. ‘I assure you, sir, we Four have done things in Chicago, in the hope of rousing people, that would have discredited Nero. But what do they say? “Very good, Andy. Have it your own way. Anything’s better than a crowd. I’ll go back to my land.” You can’t do anything with folk who can go where they please, and don’t want anything on God’s earth except their own way. There isn’t a kick or a kicker left on the Planet.’

‘Then I suppose that little shed yonder fell down by itself?’ said De Forest. We could see the bare and still smoking ruins, and hear the slag-pools crackle as they hardened and set.

‘Oh, that’s only amusement. ’Tell you later. As I was saying, our Serviles held the meeting, and pretty soon we had to ground-circuit the platform to save ’em from being killed. And that didn’t make our people any more pacific.’

‘How d’you mean?’ I ventured to ask.

‘If you’ve ever been ground-circuited,’ said the Mayor, ‘you’ll know it don’t improve any man’s temper to be held up straining against nothing. No, sir! Eight or nine hundred folk kept pawing and buzzing like flies in treacle for two hours, while a pack of perfectly safe Serviles invades their mental and spiritual privacy, may be amusing to watch, but they are not pleasant to handle afterwards.’

Pirolo chuckled.

‘Our folk own themselves. They were of opinion things were going too far and too fiery. I warned the Serviles; but they’re born house-dwellers. Unless a fact hits ’em on the head, they cannot see it. Would you believe me, they went on to talk of what they called “popular government”? They did! They wanted us to go back to the old Voodoo-business of voting with papers and wooden boxes, and word-drunk people and printed formulas, and news-sheets! They said they practised it among themselves about what they’d have to eat in their flats and hotels. Yes, sir! They stood up behind Bluthner’s doubled ground-circuits, and they said that, in this present year of grace, to self-owning men and women, on that very spot! Then they finished’—he lowered his voice cautiously—‘by talking about “The People.” And then Bluthner he had to sit up all night in charge of the circuits because he couldn’t trust his men to keep ’em shut.’

‘It was trying ’em too high,’ the Chief of Police broke in. ‘But we couldn’t hold the crowd ground-circuited for ever. I gathered in all the Serviles on charge of crowd-making, and put ’em in the water-tower, and then I let things cut loose. I had to! The District lit like a sparked gas-tank!’

‘The news was out over seven degrees of country,’ the Mayor continued; ‘and when once it’s a question of invasion of privacy, good-bye to right and reason in Illinois! They began turning out traffic-lights and locking up landing-towers on Thursday night. Friday, they stopped all traffic and asked for the Board to take over. Then they wanted to clean Chicago off the side of the Lake and rebuild elsewhere—just for a souvenir of “The People” that the Serviles talked about. I suggested that they should slag the Old Market where the meeting was held, while I turned in a call to you all on the Board. That kept ’em quiet till you came along. And—and now you can take hold of the situation.’

‘Any chance of their quieting down?’ De Forest asked.

‘You can try,’ said the Mayor.

De Forest raised his voice in the face of the reviving crowd that had edged in towards us. Day was come.

‘Don’t you think this business can be arranged?’ he began. But there was a roar of angry voices:

‘We’ve finished with Crowds! We aren’t going back to the Old Days! Take us over! Take the Serviles away! Administer direct or we’ll kill ’em! Down with The People!’

An attempt was made to begin MacDonough’s Song. It got no further than the first line, for the Victor Pirolo sent down a warning drone on one stopped horn. A wrecked side-wall of the Old Market tottered and fell inwards on the slag-pools. None spoke or moved till the last of the dust had settled down again, turning the steel case of Salati’s Statue ashy grey.

‘You see you’ll just have to take us over’, the Mayor whispered.

De Forest shrugged his shoulders.

‘You talk as if executive capacity could be snatched out of the air like so much horse-power. Can’t you manage yourselves on any terms?’ he said.

‘We can, if you say so. It will only cost those few lives to begin with.’

The Mayor pointed across the square, where Arnott’s men guided a stumbling group of ten or twelve men and women to the lake front and halted them under the Statue.

‘Now I think,’ said Takahira under his breath, ‘there will be trouble.’

The mass in front of us growled like beasts.

At that moment the sun rose clear, and revealed the blinking assembly to itself. As soon as it realised that it was a crowd we saw the shiver of horror and mutual repulsion shoot across it precisely as the steely flaws shot across the lake outside. Nothing was said, and, being half blind, of course it moved slowly. Yet in less than fifteen minutes most of that vast multitude—three thousand at the lowest count—melted away like frost on south eaves. The remnant stretched themselves on the grass, where a crowd feels and looks less like a crowd.

‘These mean business,’ the Mayor whispered to Takahira. ‘There are a goodish few women there who’ve borne children. I don’t like it.’

The morning draught off the lake stirred the trees round us with promise of a hot day; the sun reflected itself dazzlingly on the canister-shaped covering of Salati’s Statue; cocks crew in the gardens, and we could hear gate-latches clicking in the distance as people stumblingly resought their homes.

‘I’m afraid there won’t be any morning deliveries,’ said De Forest. ‘We rather upset things in the country last night.’

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‘That makes no odds,’ the Mayor returned. ‘We’re all provisioned for six months. We take no chances.’

Nor, when you come to think of it, does anyone else. It must be three-quarters of a generation since any house or city faced a food shortage. Yet is there house or city on the Planet today that has not half a year’s provisions laid in? We are like the shipwrecked seamen in the old books, who, having once nearly starved to death, ever afterwards hide away bits of food and biscuit. Truly we trust no Crowds, nor system based on Crowds!

De Forest waited till the last footstep had died away. Meantime the prisoners at the base of the Statue shuffled, posed and fidgeted, with the shamelessness of quite little children. None of them were more than six feet high, and many of them were as grey-haired as the ravaged, harassed heads of old pictures. They huddled together in actual touch, while the crowd, spaced at large intervals, looked at them with congested eyes.

Suddenly a man among them began to talk. The Mayor had not in the least exaggerated. It appeared that our Planet lay sunk in slavery beneath the heel of the Aerial Board of Control. The orator urged us to arise in our might, burst our prison doors and break our fetters (all his metaphors, by the way, were of the most medieval). Next he demanded that every matter of daily life, including most of the physical functions, should be submitted for decision at any time of the week, month, or year to, I gathered, anybody who happened to be passing by or residing within a certain radius, and that everybody should forthwith abandon his concerns to settle the matter, first by crowd-making, next by talking to the crowds made, and lastly by describing crosses on pieces of paper, which rubbish should later be counted with certain mystic ceremonies and oaths. Out of this amazing play, he assured us, would automatically arise a higher, nobler, and kinder world, based—he demonstrated this with the awful lucidity of the insane—based on the sanctity of the Crowd and the villainy of the single person. In conclusion, he called loudly upon God to testify to his personal merits and integrity. When the flow ceased, I turned bewildered to Takahira, who was nodding solemnly.

‘Quite correct,’ said he ‘It is all in the old books. He has left nothing out, not even the war-talk.’

‘But I don’t see how this stuff can upset a child, much less a district,’ I replied.

‘Ah, you are too young,’ said Dragomiroff. ‘For another thing, you are not a mamma. Please look at the mammas.’

Ten or fifteen women who remained had separated themselves from the silent men, and were drawing in towards the prisoners. It reminded one of the stealthy encircling, before the rush in at the quarry, of wolves round musk oxen in the North. The prisoners saw, and drew together more closely. The Mayor covered his face with his hands for an instant. De Forest, bareheaded, stepped forward between the prisoners and the slowly, stiffly moving line.

‘That’s all very interesting,’ he said to the dry-lipped orator. ‘But the point seems that you’ve been making crowds and invading privacy.’

A woman stepped forward, and would have spoken, but there was a quick assenting murmur from the men, who realised that De Forest was trying to pull the situation down to ground-line.

‘Yes! Yes!’ they cried. ‘We cut out because they made crowds and invaded privacy! Stick to that! Keep on that switch! Lift the Serviles out of this! The Board’s in charge! Hsh!’

‘Yes, the Board’s in charge,’ said De Forest.

‘I’ll take formal evidence of crowd-making if you like, but the Members of the Board can testify to it. Will that do?’

The women had closed in another pace, with hands that clenched and unclenched at their sides.

‘Good! Good enough!’ the men cried. ‘We’re content. Only take them away quickly.’

‘Come along up!’ said De Forest to the captives. ‘Breakfast is quite ready.’

It appeared, however, that they did not wish to go. They intended to remain in Chicago and make crowds. They pointed out that De Forest’s proposal was gross invasion of privacy.

‘My dear fellow,’ said Pirolo to the most voluble of the leaders, ‘you hurry, or your crowd that can’t be wrong will kill you!’

‘But that would be murder,’ answered the believer in crowds; and there was a roar of laughter from all sides that seemed to show the crisis had broken.

A woman stepped forward from the line of women, laughing, I protest, as merrily as any of the company. One hand, of course, shaded her eyes, the other was at her throat.

‘Oh, they needn’t be afraid of being killed!’ she called.

‘Not in the least,’ said De Forest. ‘But don’t you think that, now the Board’s in charge, you might go home while we get these people away?’

‘I shall be home long before that. It—it has been rather a trying day.’

She stood up to her full height, dwarfing even De Forest’s six-foot-eight, and smiled, with eyes closed against the fierce light.

‘Yes, rather,’ said De Forest. ‘I’m afraid you feel the glare a little. We’ll have the ship down.’

He motioned to the Pirolo to drop between us and the sun, and at the same time to loop-circuit the prisoners, who were a trifle unsteady. We saw them stiffen to the current where they stood. The woman’s voice went on, sweet and deep and unshaken:

‘I don’t suppose you men realise how much this—this sort of thing means to a woman. I’ve borne three. We women don’t want our children given to Crowds. It must be an inherited instinct. Crowds make trouble. They bring back the Old Days. Hate, fear, blackmail, publicity, “The People”—That! That! That!’ She pointed to the Statue, and the crowd growled once more.

‘Yes, if they are allowed to go on,’ said De Forest. But this little affair—’

‘It means so much to us women that this—this little affair should never happen again. Of course, never’s a big word, but one feels so strongly that it is important to stop crowds at the very beginning. Those creatures’—she pointed with her left hand at the prisoners swaying like seaweed in a tide way as the circuit pulled them—‘those people have friends and wives and children in the city and elsewhere. One doesn’t want anything done to them, you know. It’s terrible to force a human being out of fifty or sixty years of good life. I’m only forty myself, I know. But, at the same time, one feels that an example should be made, because no price is too heavy to pay if—if these people and all that they imply can be put an end to. Do you quite understand or would you be kind enough to tell your men to take the casing off the Statue? It’s worth looking at.’

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‘I understand perfectly. But I don’t think anybody here wants to see the Statue on an empty stomach. Excuse me one moment.’ De Forest called up to the ship, ‘A flying loop ready on the port side, if you please.’ Then to the woman he said with some crispness, ‘You might leave us a little discretion in the matter.’

‘Oh, of course. Thank you for being so patient. I know my arguments are silly, but——’ She half turned away and went on in a changed voice, ‘Perhaps this will help you to decide.’

She threw out her right arm with a knife in it. Before the blade could be returned to her throat or her bosom it was twitched from her grip, sparked as it flew out of the shadow of the ship above, and fell flashing in the sunshine at the foot of the Statue fifty yards away. The outflung arm was arrested, rigid as a bar for an instant, till the releasing circuit permitted her to bring it slowly to her side. The other women shrank back silent among the men.

Pirolo rubbed his hands, and Takahira nodded.

‘That was clever of you, De Forest,’ said he.

‘What a glorious pose!’ Dragomiroff murmured, for the frightened woman was on the edge of tears.

‘Why did you stop me? I would have done it!’ she cried.

‘I have no doubt you would,’ said De Forest. ‘But we can’t waste a life like yours on these people. I hope the arrest didn’t sprain your wrist; it’s so hard to regulate a flying loop. But I think you are quite right about those persons’ women and children. We’ll take them all away with us if you promise not to do anything stupid to yourself.’

‘I promise—I promise.’ She controlled herself with an effort. ‘But it is so important to us women. We know what it means; and I thought if you saw I was in earnest——’

‘I saw you were, and you’ve gained your point. I shall take all your Serviles away with me at once. The Mayor will make lists of their friends and families in the city and the district, and he’ll ship them after us this afternoon.’

‘Sure,’ said the Mayor, rising to his feet. ‘Keefe, if you can see, hadn’t you better finish levelling off the Old Market? It don’t look sightly the way it is now, and we shan’t use it for crowds any more.’

‘I think you had better wipe out that Statue as well, Mr. Mayor,’ said De Forest. ‘I don’t question its merits as a work of art, but I believe it’s a shade morbid.’

‘Certainly, sir. Oh, Keefe! Slag the Nigger before you go on to fuse the Market. I’ll get to the Communicators and tell the District that the Board is in charge. Are you making any special appointments, sir?’

‘None. We haven’t men to waste on these backwoods. Carry on as before, but under the Board. Arnott, run your Serviles aboard, please. Ground ship and pass them through the bilge-doors. We’ll wait till we’ve finished with this work of art.’

The prisoners trailed past him, talking fluently, but unable to gesticulate in the drag of the current. Then the surfacers rolled up, two on each side of the Statue. With one accord the spectators looked elsewhere, but there was no need. Keefe turned on full power, and the thing simply melted within its case. All I saw was a surge of white-hot metal pouring over the plinth, a glimpse of Salati’s inscription, ‘To the Eternal Memory of the Justice of the People,’ ere the stone base itself cracked and powdered into finest lime. The crowd cheered.

‘Thank you,’ said De Forest; ‘but we want our breakfasts, and I expect you do too. Good-bye, Mr. Mayor! Delighted to see you at any time, but I hope I shan’t have to, officially, for the next thirty years. Good-bye, madam. Yes. We’re all given to nerves nowadays. I suffer from them myself. Good-bye, gentlemen all! You’re under the tyrannous heel of the Board from this moment, but if ever you feel like breaking your fetters you’ve only to let us know. This is no treat to us. Good luck!’

We embarked amid shouts, and did not check our lift till they had dwindled into whispers. Then De Forest flung himself on the chart room divan and mopped his forehead.

‘I don’t mind men,’ he panted, ‘but women are the devil!’

‘Still the devil,’ said Pirolo cheerfully. ‘That one would have suicided.’

‘I know it. That was why I signalled for the flying loop to be clapped on her. I owe you an apology for that, Arnott. I hadn’t time to catch your eye, and you were busy with our caitiffs. By the way, who actually answered my signal? It was a smart piece of work.’

‘Ilroy,’ said Arnott; ‘but he overloaded the wave. It may be pretty gallery-work to knock a knife out of a lady’s hand, but didn’t you notice how she rubbed ’em? He scorched her fingers. Slovenly, I call it.’

‘Far be it from me to interfere with Fleet discipline, but don’t be too hard on the boy. If that woman had killed herself they would have killed every Servile and everything related to a Servile throughout the district by nightfall.’

‘That was what she was playing for,’ Takahira said. ‘And with our Fleet gone we could have done nothing to hold them.’

‘I may be ass enough to walk into a ground-circuit,’ said Arnott, ‘but I don’t dismiss my Fleet till I’m reasonably sure that trouble is over. They’re in position still, and I intend to keep ’em there till the Serviles are shipped out of the district. That last little crowd meant murder, my friends.’

‘Nerves! All nerves!’ said Pirolo. ‘You cannot argue with agoraphobia.’

‘And it is not as if they had seen much dead—or is it?’ said Takahira.

‘In all my ninety years I have never seen death.’ Dragomiroff spoke as one who would excuse himself. ‘Perhaps that was why—last night——’

Then it came out as we sat over breakfast, that, with the exception of Arnott and Pirolo, none of us had ever seen a corpse, or knew in what manner the spirit passes.

‘We’re a nice lot to flap about governing the Planet,’ De Forest laughed. ‘I confess, now it’s all over, that my main fear was I mightn’t be able to pull it off without losing a life.’

‘I thought of that too,’ sald Arnott; ‘but there’s no death reported, and I’ve inquired everywhere. What are we supposed to do with our passengers? I’ve fed ’em.’

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‘We’re between two switches,’ De Forest drawled. ‘If we drop them in any place that isn’t under the Board, the natives will make their presence an excuse for cutting out, same as Illinois did, and forcing the Board to take over. If we drop them in any place under the Board’s control they’ll be killed as soon as our backs are turned.’

‘If you say so,’ said Pirolo thoughtfully, ‘I can guarantee that they will become extinct in process of time, quite happily. What is their birth-rate now?’

‘Go down and ask ’em,’ said De Forest.

‘I think they might become nervous and tear me to bits,’ the philosopher of Foggia replied.

‘Not really? Well?’

‘Open the bilge-doors,’ said Takahira with a downward jerk of the thumb.

‘Scarcely—after all the trouble we’ve taken to save ’em,’ said De Forest.

‘Try London,’ Arnott suggested. ‘You could turn Satan himself loose there, and they’d only ask him to dinner.’

‘Good man! You’ve given me an idea. Vincent! Oh, Vincent!’ He threw the General Communicator open so that we could all hear, and in a few minutes the chartroom filled with the rich, fruity voice of Leopold Vincent, who has purveyed all London her choicest amusements for the last thirty years. We answered with expectant grins, as though we were actually in the stalls of, say, the Combination on a first night.

‘We’ve picked up something in your line,’ De Forest began.

‘That’s good, dear man, if it’s old enough. There’s nothing to beat the old things for business purposes. Have you seen London, Chatham, and Dover at Earl’s Court? No? I thought I missed you there. Im-mense! I’ve had the real steam locomotive engines built from the old designs and the iron rails cast specially by hand. Cloth cushions in the carriages, too! Im-mense! And paper railway tickets. And Polly Milton.’

‘Polly Milton back again!’ said Arnott rapturously. ‘Book me two stalls for to-morrow night. What’s she singing now, bless her?’

‘The old songs. Nothing comes up to the old touch. Listen to this, dear men.’ Vincent carolled with flourishes:

‘You see?’ Pirolo waved his hands at us. ‘The old world always weeped when it saw crowds together. It did not know why, but it weeped. We know why, but we do not weep, except when we pay to be made to by fat, wicked old Vincent.’

‘Old, yourself!’ Vincent laughed. ‘I’m a public benefactor, I keep the world soft and united.’

‘And I’m De Forest of the Board,’ said De Forest acidly, ‘trying to get a little business done. As I was saying, I’ve picked up a few people in Chicago.’

‘I cut out. Chicago is——’

‘Do listen! They’re perfectly unique.’

‘Do they build houses of baked mud blocks while you wait—eh? That’s an old contact.’

‘They’re an untouched primitive community, with all the old ideas.’

‘Sewing-machines and maypole-dances? Cooking on coal-gas stoves, lighting pipes with matches, and driving horses? Gerolstein tried that last year. An absolute blow-out!’

De Forest plugged him wrathfully, and poured out the story of our doings for the last twenty-four hours on the top-note.

‘And they do it all in public,’ he concluded. ‘You can’t stop ’em. The more public, the better they are pleased. They’ll talk for hours—like you! Now you can come in again!’

‘Do you really mean they know how to vote?’ said Vincent. ‘Can they act it?’

‘Act? It’s their life to ’em! And you never saw such faces! Scarred like volcanoes. Envy, hatred, and malice in plain sight. Wonderfully flexible voices. They weep, too.’

‘Aloud? In public?’

‘I guarantee. Not a spark of shame or reticence in the entire installation. It’s the chance of your career.’

‘D’you say you’ve brought their voting props along—those papers and ballot-box things?’

‘No, confound you! I’m not a luggage-lifter. Apply direct to the Mayor of Chicago. He’ll forward you everything. Well?’

‘Wait a minute. Did Chicago want to kill ’em? That ’ud look well on the Communicators.’

‘Yes! They were only rescued with difficulty from a howling mob—if you know what that is.’

‘But I don’t,’ answered the Great Vincent simply.

‘Well then, they’ll tell you themselves. They can make speeches hours long.’

‘How many are there?’

‘By the time we ship ’em all over they’ll be perhaps a hundred, counting children. An old world in miniature. Can’t you see it?’

‘M-yes; but I’ve got to pay for it if it’s a blow-out, dear man.’

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‘They can sing the old war songs in the streets. They can get word-drunk, and make crowds, and invade privacy in the genuine old-fashioned way; and they’ll do the voting trick as often as you ask ’em a question.’

‘Too good!’ said Vincent.

‘You unbelieving Jew! I’ve got a dozen head aboard here. I’ll put you through direct. Sample ’em yourself.’

He lifted the switch and we listened. Our passengers on the lower deck at once, but not less than five at a time, explained themselves to Vincent. They had been taken from the bosom of their families, stripped of their possessions, given food without finger-bowls, and cast into captivity in a noisome dungeon.

‘But look here,’ said Arnott aghast; ‘they’re saying what isn’t true. My lower deck isn’t noisome, and I saw to the finger-bowls myself.’

‘My people talk like that sometimes in Little Russia,’ said Dragomiroff. ‘We reason with them. We never kill. No!’

‘But it’s not true,’ Arnott insisted. ‘What can you do with people who don’t tell facts? They’re mad!’

‘Hsh!’ said Pirolo, his hand to his ear. ‘It is such a little time since all the Planet told lies.’

We heard Vincent silkily sympathetic. Would they, he asked, repeat their assertions in public—before a vast public? Only let Vincent give them a chance, and the Planet, they vowed, should ring with their wrongs. Their aim in life—two women and a man explained it together—was to reform the world. Oddly enough, this also had been Vincent’s life-dream. He offered them an arena in which to explain, and by their living example to raise the Planet to loftier levels. He was eloquent on the moral uplift of a simple, old-world life presented in its entirety to a deboshed civilisation.

Could they—would they—for three months certain, devote themselves under his auspices, as missionaries, to the elevation of mankind at a place called Earl’s Court, which he said, with some truth, was one of the intellectual centres of the Planet? They thanked him, and demanded (we could hear his chuckle of delight) time to discuss and to vote on the matter. The vote, solemnly managed by counting heads—one head, one vote—was favourable. His offer, therefore, was accepted, and they moved a vote of thanks to him in two speeches—one by what they called the ‘proposer’ and the other by the ‘seconder.’

Vincent threw over to us, his voice shaking with gratitude.

‘I’ve got ’em! Did you hear those speeches? That’s Nature, dear men. Art can’t teach that. And they voted as easily as lying. I’ve never had a troupe of natural liars before. Bless you, dear men! Remember, you’re on my free lists for ever, anywhere—all of you. Oh, Gerolstein will be sick—sick!’

‘Then you think they’ll do?’ said De Forest.

‘Do? The Little Village’ll go crazy! I’ll knock up a series of old—world plays for ’em. Their voices will make you laugh and cry. My God, dear men, where do you suppose they picked up all their misery from, on this sweet earth? I’ll have a pageant of the world’s beginnings, and Mosenthal shall do the music. I’ll——’

‘Go and knock up a village for ’em by to-night. We’ll meet you at No.15 West Landing Tower,’ said De Forest. ‘Remember the rest will be coming along to-morrow.’

‘Let ’em all come!’ said Vincent. ‘You don’t know how hard it is nowadays even for me, to find something that really gets under the public’s damned iridium-plated hide. But I’ve got it at last. Good-bye!’

‘Well,’ said De Forest when we had finished laughing, ‘if any one understood corruption in London I might have played off Vincent against Gerolstein, and sold my captives at enormous prices. As it is, I shall have to be their legal adviser to-night when the contracts are signed. And they won’t exactly press any commission on me, either.’

‘Meantime,’ said Takahira, ‘we cannot, of course, confine members of Leopold Vincent’s last-engaged company. Chairs for the ladies, please, Arnott.’

‘Then I go to bed,’ said De Forest. ‘I can’t face any more women!’ And he vanished.

When our passengers were released and given another meal (finger-bowls came first this time) they told us what they thought of us and the Board; and, like Vincent, we all marvelled how they had contrived to extract and secrete so much bitter poison and unrest out of the good life God gives us. They raged, they stormed, they palpitated, flushed and exhausted their poor, torn nerves, panted themselves into silence, and renewed the senseless, shameless attacks.

‘But can’t you understand,’ said Pirolo pathetically to a shrieking woman, ‘that if we’d left you in Chicago you’d have been killed?’

‘No, we shouldn’t. You were bound to save us from being murdered.’

‘Then we should have had to kill a lot of other people.’

‘That doesn’t matter. We were preaching the Truth. You can’t stop us. We shall go on preaching in London; and then you’ll see!’

‘You can see now,’ said Pirolo, and opened a lower shutter.

We were closing on the Little Village, with her three Million people spread out at ease inside her ring of girdling Main-Traffic lights—those eight fixed beams at Chatham, Tonbridge, Redhill, Dorking, Woking, St. Albans, Chipping Ongar, and Southend.

Leopold Vincent’s new company looked, with small pale faces, at the silence, the size, and the separated houses.

Then some began to weep aloud, shamelessly—always without shame.

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‘BOOK—Book—Domesday Book!’ They were letting in the water for the evening stint at Robert’s Mill, and the wooden Wheel, where lived the Spirit of the Mill, settled to its nine-hundred-year-old song: ‘Here Azor, a freeman, held one rod, but it never paid geld. Nun-nun-nunquam geldavit. Here Reinbert has one villein and four cottars with one plough—and wood for six hogs and two fisheries of sixpence and a mill of ten shillings—unum molinum—one mill. Reinbert’s mill—Robert’s Mill. Then and afterwards and now—tune et post et modo—Robert’s Mill. Book—Book—Domesday Book!’  ‘I confess,’ said the Black Rat on the crossbeam, luxuriously trimming his whiskers—‘I confess I am not above appreciating my position and all it means.’ He was a genuine old English black rat, a breed which, report says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown variety.

‘Appreciation is the surest sign of inadequacy,’ said the Grey Cat, coiled up on a piece of sacking.

‘But I know what you mean,’ she added. ‘To sit by right at the heart of things—eh?’

‘Yes,’ said the Black Rat, as the old mill shook and the heavy stones thuttered on the grist. ‘To possess—er—all this environment as an integral part of one’s daily life must insensibly of course . . . You see?’

‘I feel,’ said the Grey Cat. ‘Indeed, if we are not saturated with the spirit of the Mill, who should be?’

‘Book—Book—Domesday Book!’ The Wheel, set to his work, was running off the tenure of the whole rape, for he knew Domesday Book backwards and forwards: ‘In Ferle tenuit Abbatia de Wiltuna unam hidam et unam virgam et dimidiam. Nunquam geldavit. And Agemond, a freeman, has half a hide and one rod. I remember Agemond well. Charmin’ fellow—friend of mine. He married a Norman girl in the days when we rather looked down on the Normans as upstarts. An’ Agemond’s dead? So he is. Eh, dearie me! dearie me! I remember the wolves howling outside his door in the big frost of Ten Fifty-Nine . . . . Essewelde hundredum nunquam geldum reddidit. Book! Book! Domesday Book!’

‘After all,’ the Grey Cat continued, ‘atmosphere is life. It is the influences under which we live that count in the long run. Now, outside’ she cocked one ear towards the half-opened door—‘there is an absurd convention that rats and cats are, I won’t go so far as to say natural enemies, but opposed forces. Some such ruling may be crudely effective—I don’t for a minute presume to set up my standards as final—among the ditches; but from the larger point of view that one gains by living at the heart of things, it seems for a rule of life a little overstrained. Why, because some of your associates have, shall I say, liberal views on the ultimate destination of a sack of—er—middlings, don’t they call them——’

‘Something of that sort,’ said the Black Rat, a most sharp and sweet-toothed judge of everything ground in the mill for the last three years.

‘Thanks—middlings be it. Why, as I was saying, must I disarrange my fur and my digestion to chase you round the dusty arena whenever we happen to meet?’

‘As little reason,’ said the Black Rat, ‘as there is for me, who, I trust, am a person of ordinarily decent instincts, to wait till you have gone on a round of calls, and then to assassinate your very charming children.’

‘Exactly! It has its humorous side though.’ The Grey Cat yawned. ‘The miller seems afflicted by it. He shouted large and vague threats to my address, last night at tea, that he wasn’t going to keep cats who “caught no mice.” Those were his words. I remember the grammar sticking in my throat like a herring-bone.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘What does one do when a barbarian utters? One ceases to utter and removes. I removed—towards his pantry. It was a riposte he might appreciate.’

‘Really those people grow absolutely insufferable,’ said the Black Rat. ‘There is a local ruffian who answers to the name of Mangles—a builder—who has taken possession of the outhouses on the far side of the Wheel for the last fortnight. He has constructed cubical horrors in red brick where those deliciously picturesque pigstyes used to stand. Have you noticed?’

‘There has been much misdirected activity of late among the humans. They jabber inordinately. I haven’t yet been able to arrive at their reason for existence.’ The Cat yawned.

‘A couple of them came in here last week with wires, and fixed them all about the walls. Wires protected by some abominable composition, ending in iron brackets with glass bulbs. Utterly useless for any purpose and artistically absolutely hideous. What do they mean?’

‘Aaah! I have known four-and-twenty leaders of revolt in Faenza,’ said the Cat, who kept good company with the boarders spending a summer at the Mill Farm. ‘It means nothing except that humans occasionally bring their dogs with them. I object to dogs in all forms.’

‘Shouldn’t object to dogs,’ said the Wheel sleepily . . . . ‘The Abbot of Wilton kept the best pack in the county. He enclosed all the Harryngton Woods to Sturt Common. Aluric, a freeman, was dispossessed of his holding. They tried the case at Lewes, but he got no change out of William de Warrenne on the bench. William de Warrenne fined Aluric eight and fourpence for treason, and the Abbot of Wilton excommunicated him for blasphemy. Aluric was no sportsman. Then the Abbot’s brother married . . . . I’ve forgotten her name, but she was a charmin’ little woman. The Lady Philippa was her daughter. That was after the barony was conferred. She rode devilish straight to hounds. They were a bit throatier than we breed now, but a good pack one of the best. The Abbot kept ’em in splendid shape. Now, who was the woman the Abbot kept? Book—Book ! I shall have to go right back to Domesday and work up the centuries: Modo per omnia reddit burgum tunc—tunc—tunc! Was it burgum or hundredum? I shall remember in a minute. There’s no hurry.’ He paused as he turned over, silvered with showering drops.

‘This won’t do,’ said the Waters in the sluice. ‘Keep moving.’

The Wheel swung forward; the Waters roared on the buckets and dropped down to the darkness below.

‘Noisier than usual,’ said the Black Rat. ‘It must have been raining up the valley.’

‘Floods maybe,’ said the Wheel dreamily. ‘It isn’t the proper season, but they can come without warning. I shall never forget the big one—when the Miller went to sleep and forgot to open the hatches. More than two hundred years ago it was, but I recall it distinctly. Most unsettling.’

‘We lifted that wheel off his bearings,’ cried the Waters. ‘We said, “Take away that bauble!” And in the morning he was five miles down the valley—hung up in a tree.’

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‘Vulgar!’ said the Cat. ‘But I am sure he never lost his dignity.’

‘We don’t know. He looked like the Ace of Diamonds when we had finished with him . . . . Move on there! Keep on moving. Over! Get over!’

‘And why on this day more than any other?’ said the Wheel statelily. ‘I am not aware that my department requires the stimulus of external pressure to keep it up to its duties. I trust I have the elementary instincts of a gentleman.’

‘Maybe,’ the Waters answered together, leaping down on the buckets. ‘We only know that you are very stiff on your bearings. Over, get over!’

The Wheel creaked and groaned. There was certainly greater pressure upon him than he had ever felt, and his revolutions had increased from six and three-quarters to eight and a third per minute. But the uproar between the narrow, weed-hung walls annoyed the Grey Cat.

‘Isn’t it almost time,’ she said plaintively, ‘that the person who is paid to understand these things shuts off those vehement drippings with that screw-thing on the top of that box-thing?’

‘They’ll be shut off at eight o’clock as usual,’ said the Rat; ‘then we can go to dinner.’

‘But we shan’t be shut off till ever so late,’ said the Waters gaily. ‘We shall keep it up all night.’

‘The ineradicable offensiveness of youth is partially compensated for by its eternal hopefulness,’ said the Cat. ‘Our dam is not, I am glad to say, designed to furnish water for more than four hours at a time. Reserve is Life.’

‘Thank goodness!’ said the Black Rat. ‘Then they can return to their native ditches.’

‘Ditches!’ cried the Waters; ‘Raven’s Gill Brook is no ditch. It is almost navigable, and we come from there away.’ They slid over solid and compact till the Wheel thudded under their weight.

‘Raven’s Gill Brook,’ said the Rat. ‘I never heard of Raven’s Gill.’

‘We are the waters of Harpenden Brook—down from under Canton Rise. Phew! how the race stinks compared with the heather country.’ Another five foot of water flung itself against the Wheel, broke, roared, gurgled, and was gone.

‘Indeed?’ said the Grey Cat. ‘I am sorry to tell you that Raven’s Gill Brook is cut off from this valley by an absolutely impassable range of mountains, and Callton Rise is more than nine miles away. It belongs to another system entirely.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said the Rat, grinning, ‘but we forget that, for the young, water always runs uphill.’

‘Oh, hopeless! hopeless! hopeless!’ cried the Waters, descending open-palmed upon the Wheel. ‘There is nothing between here and Raven’s Gill Brook that a hundred yards of channelling and a few square feet of concrete could not remove; and hasn’t removed!’

‘And Harpenden Brook is north of Raven’s Gill and runs into Raven’s Gill at the foot of Callton Rise, where the big ilex trees are, and we come from there!’ These were the glassy, clear waters of the high chalk.

‘And Batten’s Ponds, that are fed by springs, have been led through Trott’s Wood, taking the spare water from the old Witches’ Spring under Churt Haw, and we—we—we are their combined waters!’ Those were the Waters from the upland bogs and moors—a porter-coloured, dusky, and foam-flecked flood.

‘It’s all very interesting,’ purred the Cat to the sliding waters, ‘and I have no doubt that Trott’s Woods and Bott’s Woods are tremendously important places; but if you could manage to do your work—whose value I don’t in the least dispute—a little more soberly, I, for one, should be grateful.’

‘Book—book—book—book—book—Domesday Book!’ The urged Wheel was fairly clattering now: ‘In Burgelstaltone a monk holds of Earl Godwin one hide and a half with eight villeins. There is a church—and a monk …. I remember that monk. Blessed if he could rattle his rosary off any quicker than I am doing now . . . and wood for seven hogs. I must be running twelve to the minute . . . almost as fast as Steam. Damnable invention, Steam! . . . Surely it’s time we went to dinner or prayers—or something. Can’t keep up this pressure, day in and day out, and not feel it. I don’t mind for myself, of course. Noblesse oblige, you know. I’m only thinking of the Upper and the Nether Millstones. They came out of the common rock. They can’t be expected to——’

‘Don’t worry on our account, please,’ said the Millstones huskily. ‘So long as you supply the power we’ll supply the weight and the bite.’

‘Isn’t it a trifle blasphemous, though, to work you in this way?’ grunted the Wheel. ‘I seem to remember something about the Mills of God grinding “ slowly.” Slowly was the word!’

‘But we are not the Mills of God. We’re only the Upper and the Nether Millstones. We have received no instructions to be anything else. We are actuated by power transmitted through you.’

‘Ah, but let us be merciful as we are strong. Think of all the beautiful little plants that grow on my woodwork. There are five varieties of rare moss within less than one square yard—and all these delicate jewels of nature are being grievously knocked about by this excessive rush of the water.’

‘Umph!’ growled the Millstones. ‘What with your religious scruples and your taste for botany we’d hardly know you for the Wheel that put the carter’s son under last autumn. You never worried about him!’

‘He ought to have known better.’

‘So ought your jewels of nature. Tell ’em to grow where it’s safe.’

‘How a purely mercantile life debases and brutalises!’ said the Cat to the Rat.

‘They were such beautiful little plants too,’ said the Rat tenderly. ‘Maiden’s-tongue and hart’s-hair fern trellising all over the wall just as they do on the sides of churches in the Downs. Think what a joy the sight of them must be to our sturdy peasants pulling hay!’

page 3

‘Golly!’ said the Millstones. ‘There’s nothing like coming to the heart of things for information’; and they returned to the song that all English water-mills have sung from time beyond telling:

There was a jovial miller once
Lived on the River Dee,
And this the burden of his song
For ever used to be.

Then, as fresh grist poured in and dulled the note

I care for nobody—no, not I,
And nobody cares for me.

‘Even these stones have absorbed something of our atmosphere,’ said the Grey Cat. ‘Nine-tenths of the trouble in this world comes from lack of detachment.’

‘One of your people died from forgetting that, didn’t she?’ said the Rat.

‘One only. The example has sufficed us for generations.’

‘Ah! but what happened to Don’t Care?’ the Waters demanded.

‘Brutal riding to death of the casual analogy is another mark of provincialism!’ The Grey Cat raised her tufted chin. ‘I am going to sleep. With my social obligations I must snatch rest when I can; but, as our old friend here says, Noblesse oblige . . . . Pity me! Three functions to-night in the village, and a barn-dance across the valley!’

‘There’s no chance, I suppose, of your looking in on the loft about two. Some of our young people are going to amuse themselves with a new sacque-dance—best white flour only,’ said the Black Rat.

‘I believe I am officially supposed not to countenance that sort of thing, but youth is youth. . . By the way, the humans set my milk-bowl in the loft these days; I hope your youngsters respect it.’

‘My dear lady,’ said the Black Rat, bowing, ‘you grieve me. You hurt me inexpressibly. After all these years, too!’

‘A general crush is so mixed—highways and hedges—all that sort of thing—and no one can answer for one’s best friends. I never try. So long as mine are amusin’ and in full voice, and can hold their own at a tile-party, I’m as catholic as these mixed waters in the dam here!’

‘We aren’t mixed. We have mixed. We are one now,’ said the Waters sulkily.

‘Still uttering?’ said the Cat. ‘Never mind, here’s the Miller coming to shut you off. Ye-es, I have known—four—or five, is it?—and twenty leaders of revolt in Faenza . . . . A little more babble in the dam, a little more noise in the sluice, a little extra splashing on the wheel, and then——’

‘They will find that nothing has occurred,’ said the Black Rat. ‘The old things persist and survive and are recognised—our old friend here first of all. By the way,’ he turned toward the Wheel, ‘I believe we have to congratulate you on your latest honour.’

‘Profoundly well deserved—even if he had never—as he has—laboured strenuously through a long life for the amelioration of millkind,’ said the Cat, who belonged to many tile and oasthouse committees. ‘Doubly deserved, I may say, for the silent and dignified rebuke his existence offers to the clattering, fidgety-footed demands of—er—some people. What form did the honour take?’

‘It was,’ said the Wheel bashfully, ‘a machine-moulded pinion.’

‘Pinions! Oh, how heavenly!’ the Black Rat sighed. ‘I never see a bat without wishing for wings.’

‘Not exactly that sort of pinion,’ said the Wheel, ‘but a really ornate circle of toothed iron wheels. Absurd, of course, but gratifying. Mr. Mangles and an associate herald invested me with it personally—on my left rim—the side that you can’t see from the mill. I hadn’t meant to say anything about it—or the new steel straps round my axles—bright red, you know—to be worn on all occasions—but, without false modesty, I assure you that the recognition cheered me not a little.’

‘How intensely gratifying!’ said the Black Rat. ‘I must really steal an hour between lights some day and see what they are doing on your left side.’

‘By the way, have you any light on this recent activity of Mr. Mangles?’ the Grey Cat asked. ‘He seems to be building small houses on the far side of the tail-race. Believe me, I don’t ask from any vulgar curiosity.’

‘It affects our Order,’ said the Black Rat simply but firmly.

‘Thank you,’ said the Wheel. ‘Let me see if I can tabulate it properly. Nothing like system in accounts of all kinds. Book! Book! Book! On the side of the Wheel towards the hundred of Burgelstaltone, where till now was a stye of three hogs, Mangles, a freeman, with four villeins and two carts of two thousand bricks, has a new small house of five yards and a half, and one roof of iron and a floor of cement. Then, now, and afterwards beer in large tankards. And Felden, a stranger, with three villeins and one very great cart, deposits on it one engine of iron and brass and a small iron mill of four feet, and a broad strap of leather. And Mangles, the builder, with two villeins, constructs the floor for the same, and a floor of new brick with wires for the small mill. There are there also chalices filled with iron and water, in number fifty-seven. The whole is valued at one hundred and seventy-four pounds . . . . I’m sorry I can’t make myself clearer, but you can see for yourself.’

‘Amazingly lucid,’ said the Cat. She was the more to be admired because the language of Domesday Book is not, perhaps, the clearest medium wherein to describe a small but complete electric-light installation, deriving its power from a water-wheel by means of cogs and gearing.

‘See for yourself—by all means, see for yourself,’ said the Waters, spluttering and choking with mirth.

‘Upon my word,’ said the Black Rat furiously, ‘I may be at fault, but I wholly fail to perceive where these offensive eavesdroppers—er—come in. We were discussing a matter that solely affected our Order.’

page 4

Suddenly they heard, as they had heard many times before, the Miller shutting off the water. To the rattle and rumble of the labouring stones succeeded thick silence, punctuated with little drops from the stayed wheel. Then some water-bird in the dam fluttered her wings as she slid to her nest, and the plop of a water-rat sounded like the fall of a log in the water.

‘It is all over—it always is all over at just this time. Listen, the Miller is going to bed—as usual. Nothing has occurred,’ said the Cat.

Something creaked in the house where the pigstyes had stood, as metal engaged on metal with a clink and a burr.

‘Shall I turn her on?’ cried the Miller.

‘Ay,’ said the voice from the dynamo-house.

‘A human in Mangles’ new house!’ the Rat squeaked.

‘What of it?’ said the Grey Cat. ‘Even supposing Mr. Mangles’ cat’s-meat-coloured hovel pullulated with humans, can’t you see for yourself—that——?’

There was a solid crash of released waters leaping upon the Wheel more furiously than ever, a grinding of cogs, a hum like the hum of a hornet, and then the unvisited darkness of the old mill was scattered by intolerable white light. It threw up every cobweb, every burl and knot in the beams and the floor; till the shadows behind the flakes of rough plaster on the wall lay clearcut as shadows of mountains on the photographed moon.

‘See! See! See!’ hissed the Waters in full flood. ‘Yes, see for yourselves. Nothing has occurred. Can’t you see?’

The Rat, amazed, had fallen from his foothold and lay half-stunned on the floor. The Cat, following her instinct, leaped nigh to the ceiling, and with flattened ears and bared teeth backed in a corner ready to fight whatever terror might be loosed on her. But nothing happened. Through the long aching minutes nothing whatever happened, and her wire-brush tail returned slowly to its proper shape.

‘Whatever it is,’ she said at last, ‘it’s overdone. They can never keep it up, you know.’

‘Much you know,’ said the Waters. ‘Over you go, old man. You can take the full head of us now. Those new steel axlestraps of yours can stand anything. Come along, Raven’s Gill, Harpenden, Callton Rise, Batten’s Ponds, Witches’ Spring, all together! Let’s show these gentlemen how to work!’

‘But—but—I thought it was a decoration. Why—why—why—it only means more work for me!’

‘Exactly. You’re to supply about sixty-eight candle lights when required. But they won’t be all in use at once’

‘Ah! I thought as much,’ said the Cat. ‘The reaction is bound to come.’

‘And,’ said the Waters, ‘you will do the ordinary work of the mill as well.’

‘Impossible!’ the old Wheel quivered as it drove. ‘Aluric never did it—nor Azor, nor Reinbert. Not even William de Warrenne or the Papal Legate. There’s no precedent for it. I tell you there’s no precedent for working a wheel like this.’

‘Wait a while! We’re making one as fast as we can. Aluric and Co. are dead. So’s the Papal Legate. You’ve no notion how dead they are, but we’re here—the Waters of Five Separate Systems. We’re just as interesting as Domesday Book. Would you like to hear about the land-tenure in Trott’s Wood? It’s squat-right, chiefly:’ The mocking Waters leaped one over the other, chuckling and chattering profanely.

‘In that hundred Jenkins, a tinker, with one dog—unus canis—holds, by the Grace of God and a habit he has of working hard, unam hidam—a large potato-patch. Charmin’ fellow, Jenkins. Friend of ours. Now, who the dooce did Jenkins keep? . . . In the hundred of Canton is one charcoal-burner irreligiosissimus homo—a bit of a rip—but a thorough sportsman. Ibi est ecclesia. Non multum. Not much of a church, quia because, episcopus the Vicar irritated the Non-conformists tunc et post et modo—then and afterwards and now—until they built a cut-stone Congregational chapel with red brick facings that did not return itself—defendebat se—at four thousand pounds.’

‘Charcoal-burners, vicars, schismatics, and red brick facings,’ groaned the Wheel. ‘But this is sheer blasphemy. What waters have they let in upon me?’

‘Floods from the gutters. Faugh, this light is positively sickening!’ said the Cat, rearranging her fur.

‘We come down from the clouds or up from the springs, exactly like all other waters everywhere. Is that what’s surprising you?’ sang the Waters.

‘Of course not. I know my work if you don’t. What I complain of is your lack of reverence and repose. You’ve no instinct of deference towards your betters—your heartless parody of the Sacred volume (the Wheel meant Domesday Book) proves it.’

‘Our betters?’ said the Waters most solemnly. ‘What is there in all this dammed race that hasn’t come down from the clouds, or——’

‘Spare me that talk, please,’ the Wheel persisted. ‘You’d never understand. It’s the tone—your tone that we object to.’

‘Yes. It’s your tone,’ said the Black Rat, picking himself up limb by limb.

‘If you thought a trifle more about the work you’re supposed to do, and a trifle less about your precious feelings, you’d render a little more duty in return for the power vested in you—we mean wasted on you,’ the Waters replied.

‘I have been some hundreds of years laboriously acquiring the knowledge which you see fit to challenge so lightheartedly,’ the Wheel jarred.

‘Challenge him! Challenge him!’ clamoured the little waves riddling down through the tailrace. ‘As well now as later. Take him up!’

The main mass of the Waters plunging on the Wheel shocked that well-bolted structure almost into box-lids by saying: ‘Very good. Tell us what you suppose yourself to be doing at the present moment.’

page 5

‘Waiving the offensive form of your question, I answer, purely as a matter of courtesy, that I am engaged in the trituration of farinaceous substances whose ultimate destination it would be a breach of the trust reposed in me to reveal.’

‘Fiddle!’ said the Waters. ‘We knew it all along! The first direct question shows his ignorance of his own job. Listen, old thing. Thanks to us, you are now actuating a machine of whose construction you know nothing, that that machine may, over wires of whose ramifications you are, by your very position, profoundly ignorant, deliver a power which you can never realise, to localities beyond the extreme limits of your mental horizon, with the object of producing phenomena which in your wildest dreams (if you ever dream) you could never comprehend. Is that clear, or would you like it all in words of four syllables?’

‘Your assumptions are deliciously sweeping, but may I point out that a decent and—the dear old Abbot of Wilton would have put it in his resonant monkish Latin much better than I can—a scholarly reserve does not necessarily connote blank vacuity of mind on all subjects?’

‘Ah, the dear old Abbot of Wilton,’ said the Rat sympathetically, as one nursed in that bosom. ‘Charmin’ fellow—thorough scholar and gentleman. Such a pity!’

‘Oh, Sacred Fountains!’—the Waters were fairly boiling. ‘He goes out of his way to expose his ignorance by triple bucketfuls. He creaks to high Heaven that he is hopelessly behind the common order of things! He invites the streams of Five Watersheds to witness his su-su-su-pernal incompetence, and then he talks as though there were untold reserves of knowledge behind him that he is too modest to bring forward. For a bland, circular, absolutely sincere imposter, you’re a miracle, O Wheel!’

‘I do not pretend to be anything more than an integral portion of an accepted and not altogether mushroom institution.’

‘Quite so,’ said the Waters. ‘Then go round—hard——’

‘To what end?’ asked the Wheel.

‘Till a big box of tanks in your house begins to fizz and fume—gassing is the proper word.’

‘It would be,’ said the Cat, sniffing.

‘That will show that your accumulators are full. When the accumulators are exhausted, and the lights burn badly, you will find us whacking you round and round again.’

‘The end of life as decreed by Mangles and his creatures is to go whacking round and round for ever,’ said the Cat.

‘In order,’ the Rat said, ‘that you may throw raw and unnecessary illumination upon all the unloveliness in the world. Unloveliness which we shall—er—have always with us. At the same time you will riotously neglect the so-called little but vital graces that make up Life.’

‘Yes, Life,’ said the Cat, ‘with its dim delicious half-tones and veiled indeterminate distances. Its surprisals, escapes, encounters, and dizzying leaps—its full-throated choruses in honour of the morning star, and its melting reveries beneath the sun-warmed wall.’

‘Oh, you can go on the tiles, Pussalina, just the same as usual,’ said the laughing Waters. ‘We shan’t interfere with you.’

‘On the tiles, forsooth!’ hissed the Cat.

‘Well, that’s what it amounts to,’ persisted the Waters. ‘We see a good deal of the minor graces of life on our way down to our job.’

‘And—but I fear I speak to deaf ears—do they never impress you?’ said the Wheel.

‘Enormously,’ said the Waters. ‘We have already learned six refined synonyms for loafing.’

‘But (here again I feel as though preaching in the wilderness) it never occurs to you that there may exist some small difference between the wholly animal—ah—rumination of bovine minds and the discerning, well-apportioned leisure of the finer type of intellect?’

‘Oh, yes. The bovine mind goes to sleep under a hedge and makes no bones about it when it’s shouted at. We’ve seen that—in haying-time—all along the meadows. The finer type is wide awake enough to fudge up excuses for shirking, and mean enough to get stuffy when its excuses aren’t accepted. Turn over!’

‘But, my good people, no gentleman gets stuffy as you call it. A certain proper pride, to put it no higher, forbids——’

‘Nothing that he wants to do if he really wants to do it. Get along! What are you giving us? D’you suppose we’ve scoured half heaven in the clouds and half earth in the mists, to be taken in at this time of the day by a bone-idle, old handquern of your type?’

‘It is not for me to bandy personalities with you. I can only say that I simply decline to accept the situation.’

‘Decline away. It doesn’t make any odds. They’ll probably put in a turbine if you decline too much.’

‘What’s a turbine?’ said the Wheel quickly.

‘A little thing you don’t see, that performs surprising revolutions. But you won’t decline. You’ll hang on to your two nice red-strapped axles and your new machine-moulded pinions like—a—like a leech on a lily stem! There’s centuries of work in your old bones if you’d only apply yourself to it; and, mechanically, an overshot wheel with this head of water is about as efficient as a turbine.’

‘So in future I am to be considered mechanically? I have been painted by at least five Royal Academicians.’

‘Oh, you can be painted by five hundred when you aren’t at work, of course. But while you are at work you’ll work. You won’t half-stop and think and talk about rare plants and dicky-birds and farinaceous fiduciary interests. You’ll continue to revolve, and this new head of water will see that you do so continue.’

‘It is a matter on which it would be exceedingly ill-advised to form a hasty or a premature conclusion. I will give it my most careful consideration,’ said the Wheel.

page 6

‘Please do,’ said the Waters gravely. ‘Hullo! Here’s the Miller again.’

The Cat coiled herself in a picturesque attitude on the softest corner of a sack, and the Rat without haste, yet certainly without rest, slipped behind the sacking as though an appointment had just occurred to him.

In the doorway, with the young Engineer, stood the Miller grinning amazedly.

‘Well—well—well! ’tis true-ly won’erful. An’ what a power o’ dirt! It come over me now looking at these lights, that I’ve never rightly seen my own mill before. She needs a lot bein’ done to her.’

‘Ah! I suppose one must make oneself moderately agreeable to the baser sort. They have their uses. This thing controls the dairy.’ The Cat, pincing on her toes, came forward and rubbed her head against the Miller’s knee.

‘Ay, you pretty puss,’ he said, stooping. ‘You’re as big a cheat as the rest of ’em that catch no mice about me. A won’erful smooth-skinned, rough-tongued cheat you be. I’ve more than half a mind——’

‘She does her work well,’ said the Engineer, pointing to where the Rat’s beady eyes showed behind the sacking. ‘Cats and Rats liven’ together—see?’

‘Too much they do—too long they’ve done. I’m sick and tired of it. Go and take a swim and larn to find your own vittles honest when you come out, Pussy.’

‘My word!’ said the Waters, as a sprawling Cat landed all unannounced in the centre of the tailrace. ‘Is that you, Mewsalina? You seem to have been quarrelling with your best friend. Get over to the left. It’s shallowest there. Up on that alder-root with all four paws. Goodnight!’

‘You’ll never get any they rats,’ said the Miller, as the young Engineer struck wrathfully with his stick at the sacking. ‘They’re not the common sort. They’re the old black English sort.’

‘Are they, by Jove? I must catch one to stuff, some day.’

Six months later, in the chill of a January afternoon, they were letting in the Waters as usual.

‘Come along! It’s both gears this evening,’ said the Wheel, kicking joyously in the first rush of the icy stream. ‘There’s a heavy load of grist just in from Lamber’s Wood. Eleven miles it came in an hour and a half in our new motor-lorry, and the Miller’s rigged five new five-candle lights in his cow-stables. I’m feeding ’em tonight. There’s a cow due to calve. Oh, while I think of it, what’s the news from Canton Rise?’

‘The waters are finding their level as usual—but why do you ask?’ said the deep outpouring Waters.

‘Because Mangles and Felden and the Miller are talking of increasing the plant here and running a saw-mill by electricity. I was wondering whether we——’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Waters, chuckling. ‘What did you say? ‘

‘Whether we, of course, had power enough for the job. It will be a biggish contract. There’s all Harpenden Brook to be considered and Batten’s Ponds as well, and Witches’ Spring, and the Churt Haw system.’

‘We’ve power enough for anything in the world,’ said the Waters. ‘The only question is whether you could stand the strain if we came down on you full head.’

‘Of course I can,’ said the Wheel. ‘Mangles is going to turn me into a set of turbines—beauties.’

‘Oh—er—I suppose it’s the frost that has made us a little thick-headed, but to whom are we talking?’ asked the amazed Waters.

‘To me—the Spirit of the Mill, of course.’

‘Not to the old Wheel, then?’

‘I happen to be living in the old Wheel just at present. When the turbines are installed I shall go and live in them. What earthly difference does it make?’

‘Absolutely none,’ said the Waters, ‘in the earth or in the waters under the earth. But we thought turbines didn’t appeal to you.’

‘Not like turbines? Me? My dear fellows, turbines are good for fifteen hundred revolutions a minute—and with our power we can drive ’em at full speed. Why, there’s nothing we couldn’t grind or saw or illuminate or heat with a set of turbines! That’s to say if all the Five Watersheds are agreeable.’

‘Oh, we’ve been agreeable for ever so long.’

‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Don’t know. Suppose it slipped our memory.’ The Waters were holding themselves in for fear of bursting with mirth.

‘How careless of you! You should keep abreast of the age, my dear fellows. We might have settled it long ago, if you’d only spoken. Yes, four good turbines and a neat brick penstock—eh? This old Wheel’s absurdly out of date.’

‘Well,’ said the Cat, who after a little proud seclusion had returned to her place impenitent as ever. ‘Praised be Pasht and the Old Gods, that whatever may have happened I, at least, have preserved the Spirit of the Mill!’

She looked round as expecting her faithful ally, the Black Rat; but that very week the Engineer had caught and stuffed him, and had put him in a glass case; he being a genuine old English black rat. That breed, the report says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown variety.

page 1 of 5

WHEN Dan and Una had arranged to go out before breakfast, they did not remember that it was Midsummer Morning. They only wanted to see the otter which, old Hobden said, had been fishing their brook for weeks; and early morning was the time to surprise him. As they tiptoed out of the house into the wonderful stillness, the church clock struck five. Dan took a few steps across the dew-blobbed lawn, and looked at his black footprints.

‘I think we ought to be kind to our poor boots,’ he said. ‘They’ll get horrid wet.’

It was their first summer in boots, and they hated them, so they took them off, and slung them round their necks, and paddled joyfully over the dripping turf where the shadows lay the wrong way, like evening in the East. The sun was well up and warm, but by the brook the last of the night mist still fumed off the water. They picked up the chain of otter’s footprints on the mud, and followed it from the bank, between the weeds and the drenched mowing, while the birds shouted with surprise. Then the track left the brook and became a smear, as though a log had been dragged along.

They traced it into Three Cows meadow, over the mill-sluice to the Forge, round Hobden’s garden, and then up the slope till it ran out on the short turf and fern of Pook’s Hill, and they heard the cock-pheasants crowing in the woods behind them.

‘No use!’ said Dan, questing like a puzzled hound. ‘The dew’s drying off, and old Hobden says otters’ll travel for miles.’

‘I’m sure we’ve travelled miles.’ Una fanned herself with her hat. ‘How still it is! It’s going to be a regular roaster.’ She looked down the valley, where no chimney yet smoked.

‘Hobden’s up!’ Dan pointed to the open door of the Forge cottage. ‘What d’you suppose he has for breakfast?’

‘One of them. He says they eat good all times of the year,’ Una jerked her head at some stately pheasants going down to the brook for a drink.

A few steps farther on a fox broke almost under their bare feet, yapped, and trotted off.

‘Ah, Mus’ Reynolds—Mus’ Reynolds’—Dan was quoting from old Hobden,—‘if I knowed all you knowed, I’d know something.’ [See ‘The Winged Hats’ in Puck of Pook’s Hill.]

‘I say,’—Una lowered her voice—‘you know that funny feeling of things having happened before. I felt it when you said “Mus’ Reynolds.”’

‘So did I,’ Dan began. ‘What is it?’

They faced each other, stammering with excitement.

‘Wait a shake! I’ll remember in a minute. Wasn’t it something about a fox—last year? Oh, I nearly had it then!’ Dan cried.

‘Be quiet!’ said Una, prancing excitedly. ‘There was something happened before we met the fox last year. Hills! Broken Hills—the play at the theatre—see what you see—’

‘I remember now,’ Dan shouted. ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face—Pook’s Hill—Puck’s Hill—Puck!’

‘I remember, too,’ said Una. ‘And it’s Midsummer Day again!’ The young fern on a knoll rustled, and Puck walked out, chewing a green-topped rush.

‘Good Midsummer Morning to you! Here’s a happy meeting,’ said he. They shook hands all round, and asked questions.

‘You’ve wintered well,’ he said after a while, and looked them up and down. ‘Nothing much wrong with you, seemingly.’

‘They’ve put us into boots,’ said Una. ‘Look at my feet—they’re all pale white, and my toes are squidged together awfully.’

‘Yes—boots make a difference.’ Puck wriggled his brown, square, hairy foot, and cropped a dandelion flower between the big toe and the next.

‘I could do that—last year,’ Dan said dismally, as he tried and failed. ‘And boots simply ruin one’s climbing.’

‘There must be some advantage to them, I suppose,’ said Puck, ‘or folk wouldn’t wear them. Shall we come this way?’ They sauntered along side by side till they reached the gate at the far end of the hillside. Here they halted just like cattle, and let the sun warm their backs while they listened to the flies in the wood.

‘Little Lindens is awake,’ said Una, as she hung with her chin on the top rail. ‘See the chimney smoke?’

‘Today’s Thursday, isn’t it?’ Puck turned to look at the old pink farmhouse across the little valley. ‘Mrs Vincey’s baking day. Bread should rise well this weather.’ He yawned, and that set them both yawning.

The bracken about rustled and ticked and shook in every direction. They felt that little crowds were stealing past.

‘Doesn’t that sound like—er—the People of the Hills?’ said Una.

‘It’s the birds and wild things drawing up to the woods before people get about,’ said Puck, as though he were Ridley the keeper.

‘Oh, we know that. I only said it sounded like.’

‘As I remember ’em, the People of the Hills used to make more noise. They’d settle down for the day rather like small birds settling down for the night. But that was in the days when they carried the high hand. Oh, me! The deeds that I’ve had act and part in, you’d scarcely believe!’

‘I like that!’ said Dan. ‘After all you told us last year, too!’

‘Only, the minute you went away, you made us forget everything,’ said Una.

Puck laughed and shook his head. ‘I shall this year, too. I’ve given you seizin’ of Old England, and I’ve taken away your Doubt and Fear, but your memory and remembrance between whiles I’ll keep where old Billy Trott kept his night-lines—and that’s where he could draw ’em up and hide ’em at need. Does that suit?’ He twinkled mischievously.

‘It’s got to suit,’ said Una, and laughed. ‘We can’t magic back at you.’ She folded her arms and leaned against the gate. ‘Suppose, now, you wanted to magic me into something—an otter? Could you?’

page 2

‘Not with those boots round your neck.’

‘I’ll take them off.’ She threw them on the turf. Dan’s followed immediately. ‘Now!’ she said.

‘Less than ever now you’ve trusted me. Where there’s true faith, there’s no call for magic.’ Puck’s slow smile broadened all over his face.

‘But what have boots to do with it?’ said Una, perching on the gate.

‘There’s Cold Iron in them,’ said Puck, and settled beside her. ‘Nails in the soles, I mean. It makes a difference.’

‘How?’

‘Can’t you feel it does? You wouldn’t like to go back to bare feet again, same as last year, would you? Not really?’

‘No-o. I suppose I shouldn’t—not for always. I’m growing up, you know,’ said Una.

‘But you told us last year, in the Long Slip—at the theatre—that you didn’t mind Cold Iron,’ said Dan.

‘I don’t; but folks in housen, as the People of the Hills call them, must be ruled by Cold Iron. Folk in housen are born on the near side of Cold Iron—there’s iron in every man’s house, isn’t there? They handle Cold Iron every day of their lives, and their fortune’s made or spoilt by Cold Iron in some shape or other. That’s how it goes with Flesh and Blood, and one can’t prevent it.’

‘I don’t quite see. How do you mean?’ said Dan.

‘It would take me some time to tell you.’

‘Oh, it’s ever so long to breakfast,’ said Dan. ‘We looked in the larder before we came out.’ He unpocketed one big hunk of bread and Una another, which they shared with Puck.

‘That’s Little Lindens’ baking,’ he said, as his white teeth sunk in it. ‘I know Mrs Vincey’s hand.’ He ate with a slow sideways thrust and grind, just like old Hobden, and, like Hobden, hardly dropped a crumb. The sun flashed on Little Lindens’ windows, and the cloudless sky grew stiller and hotter in the valley.

‘Ah—Cold Iron,’ he said at last to the impatient children. ‘Folk in housen, as the People of the Hills say, grow careless about Cold Iron. They’ll nail the Horseshoe over the front door, and forget to put it over the back. Then, some time or other, the People of the Hills slip in, find the cradle-babe in the corner, and—’

‘Oh, I know. Steal it and leave a changeling,’ Una cried.

‘No,’ said Puck firmly. ‘All that talk of changelings is people’s excuse for their own neglect. Never believe ’em. I’d whip ’em at the cart-tail through three parishes if I had my way.’

‘But they don’t do it now,’ said Una.

‘Whip, or neglect children? Umm! Some folks and some fields never alter. But the People of the Hills didn’t work any changeling tricks. They’d tiptoe in and whisper and weave round the cradle-babe in the chimney-corner—a fag-end of a charm here, or half a spell there—like kettles singing; but when the babe’s mind came to bud out afterwards, it would act differently from other people in its station. That’s no advantage to man or maid. So I wouldn’t allow it with my folks’ babies here. I told Sir Huon so once.’

‘Who was Sir Huon?’ Dan asked, and Puck turned on him in quiet astonishment.

‘Sir Huon of Bordeaux—he succeeded King Oberon. He had been a bold knight once, but he was lost on the road to Babylon, a long while back. Have you ever heard “How many miles to Babylon?”?’

‘Of course,’ said Dan, flushing.

‘Well, Sir Huon was young when that song was new. But about tricks on mortal babies. I said to Sir Huon in the fern here, on just such a morning as this: “If you crave to act and influence on folk in housen, which I know is your desire, why don’t you take some human cradle-babe by fair dealing, and bring him up among yourselves on the far side of Cold Iron—as Oberon did in time past? Then you could make him a splendid fortune, and send him out into the world.”’

‘“Time past is past time,” says Sir Huon. “I doubt if we could do it. For one thing, the babe would have to be taken without wronging man, woman, or child. For another, he’d have to be born on the far side of Cold Iron—in some house where no Cold Iron ever stood; and for yet the third, he’d have to be kept from Cold Iron all his days till we let him find his fortune. No, it’s not easy,” he said, and he rode off, thinking. You see, Sir Huon had been a man once. ‘I happened to attend Lewes Market next Woden’s Day even, and watched the slaves being sold there—same as pigs are sold at Robertsbridge Market nowadays. Only, the pigs have rings on their noses, and the slaves had rings round their necks.’

‘What sort of rings?’ said Dan.

‘A ring of Cold Iron, four fingers wide, and a thumb thick, just like a quoit, but with a snap to it for to snap round the slave’s neck. They used to do a big trade in slave-rings at the Forge here, and ship them to all parts of Old England, packed in oak sawdust. But, as I was saying, there was a farmer out of the Weald who had bought a woman with a babe in her arms, and he didn’t want any encumbrances to her driving his beasts home for him.’

‘Beast himself!’ said Una, and kicked her bare heel on the gate.

‘So he blamed the auctioneer. “It’s none o’ my baby,” the wench puts in. “I took it off a woman in our gang who died on Terrible Down yesterday.” “I’ll take it off to the church then,” says the farmer. “Mother Church’ll make a monk of it, and we’ll step along home.”

‘It was dusk then. He slipped down to St Pancras’ Church, and laid the babe at the cold chapel door. I breathed on the back of his stooping neck—and—I’ve heard he never could be warm at any fire afterwards. I should have been surprised if he could! Then I whipped up the babe, and came flying home here like a bat to his belfry.

‘On the dewy break of morning of Thor’s own day—just such a day as this—I laid the babe outside the Hill here, and the People flocked up and wondered at the sight.

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‘“You’ve brought him, then?” Sir Huon said, staring like any mortal man.

‘“Yes, and he’s brought his mouth with him, too,” I said. The babe was crying loud for his breakfast.

‘“What is he?” says Sir Huon, when the womenfolk had drawn him under to feed him.

‘“Full Moon and Morning Star may know,” I says. “I don’t. By what I could make out of him in the moonlight, he’s without brand or blemish. I’ll answer for it that he’s born on the far side of Cold Iron, for he was born under a shaw on Terrible Down, and I’ve wronged neither man, woman, nor child in taking him, for he is the son of a dead slave-woman.

‘“All to the good, Robin,” Sir Huon said. “He’ll be the less anxious to leave us. Oh, we’ll give him a splendid fortune, and we shall act and influence on folk in housen as we have always craved.” His Lady came up then, and drew him under to watch the babe’s wonderful doings.’ ‘Who was his Lady?’ said Dan. ‘The Lady Esclairmonde. She had been a woman once, till she followed Sir Huon across the fern, as we say. Babies are no special treat to me—I’ve watched too many of them—so I stayed on the Hill. Presently I heard hammering down at the Forge there.’ Puck pointed towards Hobden’s cottage. ‘It was too early for any workmen, but it passed through my mind that the breaking day was Thor’s own day. A slow north-east wind blew up and set the oaks sawing and fretting in a way I remembered; so I slipped over to see what I could see.’

‘And what did you see?’

‘A smith forging something or other out of Cold Iron. When it was finished, he weighed it in his hand (his back was towards me), and tossed it from him a longish quoit-throw down the valley. I saw Cold Iron flash in the sun, but I couldn’t quite make out where it fell. That didn’t trouble me. I knew it would be found sooner or later by someone.’

‘How did you know?’ Dan went on.

‘Because I knew the Smith that made it,’ said Puck quietly.

‘Wayland Smith?’ Una suggested. [See ‘Weland’s Sword’ in Puck of Pook’s Hill.]

‘No. I should have passed the time o’ day with Wayland Smith, of course. This other was different. So’—Puck made a queer crescent in the air with his finger—‘I counted the blades of grass under my nose till the wind dropped and he had gone—he and his Hammer.’

‘Was it Thor then?’ Una murmured under her breath.

‘Who else? It was Thor’s own day.’ Puck repeated the sign. ‘I didn’t tell Sir Huon or his Lady what I’d seen. Borrow trouble for yourself if that’s your nature, but don’t lend it to your neighbours. Moreover, I might have been mistaken about the Smith’s work. He might have been making things for mere amusement, though it wasn’t like him, or he might have thrown away an old piece of made iron. One can never be sure. So I held my tongue and enjoyed the babe. He was a wonderful child—and the People of the Hills were so set on him, they wouldn’t have believed me. He took to me wonderfully. As soon as he could walk he’d putter forth with me all about my Hill here. Fern makes soft falling! He knew when day broke on earth above, for he’d thump, thump, thump, like an old buck-rabbit in a bury, and I’d hear him say “Opy!” till some one who knew the Charm let him out, and then it would be “Robin! Robin!” all round Robin Hood’s barn, as we say, till he’d found me.’

‘The dear!’ said Una. ‘I’d like to have seen him!’ ‘Yes, he was a boy. And when it came to learning his words—spells and such-like—he’d sit on the Hill in the long shadows, worrying out bits of charms to try on passers-by. And when the bird flew to him, or the tree bowed to him for pure love’s sake (like everything else on my Hill), he’d shout, “Robin! Look—see! Look, see, Robin!” and sputter out some spell or other that they had taught him, all wrong end first, till I hadn’t the heart to tell him it was his own dear self and not the words that worked the wonder. When he got more abreast of his words, and could cast spells for sure, as we say, he took more and more notice of things and people in the world. People, of course, always drew him, for he was mortal all through.

‘Seeing that he was free to move among folk in housen, under or over Cold Iron, I used to take him along with me, night-walking, where he could watch folk, and I could keep him from touching Cold Iron. That wasn’t so difficult as it sounds, because there are plenty of things besides Cold Iron in housen to catch a boy’s fancy. He was a handful, though! I shan’t forget when I took him to Little Lindens—his first night under a roof. The smell of the rushlights and the bacon on the beams—they were stuffing a feather-bed too, and it was a drizzling warm night—got into his head. Before I could stop him—we were hiding in the bakehouse—he’d whipped up a storm of wildfire, with flashlights and voices, which sent the folk shrieking into the garden, and a girl overset a hive there, and—of course he didn’t know till then such things could touch him—he got badly stung, and came home with his face looking like kidney potatoes! ‘You can imagine how angry Sir Huon and Lady Esclairmonde were with poor Robin! They said the Boy was never to be trusted with me night-walking any more—and he took about as much notice of their order as he did of the bee-stings. Night after night, as soon as it was dark, I’d pick up his whistle in the wet fern, and off we’d flit together among folk in housen till break of day—he asking questions, and I answering according to my knowledge. Then we fell into mischief again!’ Puck shook till the gate rattled.

‘We came across a man up at Brightling who was beating his wife with a bat in the garden. I was just going to toss the man over his own woodlump when the Boy jumped the hedge and ran at him. Of course the woman took her husband’s part, and while the man beat him, the woman scratted his face. It wasn’t till I danced among the cabbages like Brightling Beacon all ablaze that they gave up and ran indoors. The Boy’s fine green-and-gold clothes were torn all to pieces, and he had been welted in twenty places with the man’s bat, and scratted by the woman’s nails to pieces. He looked like a Robertsbridge hopper on a Monday morning.

‘“Robin,” said he, while I was trying to clean him down with a bunch of hay, “I don’t quite understand folk in housen. I went to help that old woman, and she hit me, Robin!”

‘“What else did you expect?” I said. “That was the one time when you might have worked one of your charms, instead of running into three times your weight.”

‘“I didn’t think,” he says. “But I caught the man one on the head that was as good as any charm. Did you see it work, Robin?”

‘“Mind your nose,” I said. “Bleed it on a dockleaf—not your sleeve, for pity’s sake.” I knew what the Lady Esclairmonde would say.

‘He didn’t care. He was as happy as a gipsy with a stolen pony, and the front part of his gold coat, all blood and grass stains, looked like ancient sacrifices.

‘Of course the People of the Hills laid the blame on me. The Boy could do nothing wrong, in their eyes.

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‘“You are bringing him up to act and influence on folk in housen, when you’re ready to let him go,” I said. “Now he’s begun to do it, why do you cry shame on me? That’s no shame. It’s his nature drawing him to his kind.”

‘“But we don’t want him to begin that way,” the Lady Esclairmonde said. “We intend a splendid fortune for him—not your flitter-by-night, hedge-jumping, gipsy-work.”

‘“I don’t blame you, Robin,” says Sir Huon, “but I do think you might look after the Boy more closely.”

‘“I’ve kept him away from Cold Iron these sixteen years ,” I said. “You know as well as I do, the first time he touches Cold Iron he’ll find his own fortune, in spite of everything you intend for him. You owe me something for that.”

‘Sir Huon, having been a man, was going to allow me the right of it, but the Lady Esclairmonde, being the Mother of all Mothers, over-persuaded him.

‘“We’re very grateful,” Sir Huon said, “but we think that just for the present you are about too much with him on the Hill.”

‘“Though you have said it,” I said, “I will give you a second chance.” I did not like being called to account for my doings on my own Hill. I wouldn’t have stood it even that far except I loved the Boy.

‘“No! No!” says the Lady Esclairmonde. “He’s never any trouble when he’s left to me and himself. It’s your fault.”

‘“You have said it,” I answered. “Hear me! From now on till the Boy has found his fortune, whatever that may be, I vow to you all on my Hill, by Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, and by the Hammer of Asa Thor”—again Puck made that curious double-cut in the air—‘“that you may leave me out of all your counts and reckonings.” Then I went out’—he snapped his fingers—‘like the puff of a candle, and though they called and cried, they made nothing by it. I didn’t promise not to keep an eye on the Boy, though. I watched him close—close—close!

‘When he found what his people had forced me to do, he gave them a piece of his mind, but they all kissed and cried round him, and being only a boy, he came over to their way of thinking (I don’t blame him), and called himself unkind and ungrateful; and it all ended in fresh shows and plays, and magics to distract him from folk in housen. Dear heart alive! How he used to call and call on me, and I couldn’t answer, or even let him know that I was near!’

‘Not even once?’ said Una. ‘If he was very lonely?’

‘No, he couldn’t,’ said Dan, who had been thinking. ‘Didn’t you swear by the Hammer of Thor that you wouldn’t, Puck?’

‘By that Hammer!’ was the deep rumbled reply. Then he came back to his soft speaking voice. ‘And the Boy was lonely, when he couldn’t see me any more. He began to try to learn all learning (he had good teachers), but I saw him lift his eyes from the big black books towards folk in housen all the time. He studied song-making (good teachers he had too!), but he sang those songs with his back toward the Hill, and his face toward folk. I know! I have sat and grieved over him grieving within a rabbit’s jump of him. Then he studied the High, Low, and Middle Magic. He had promised the Lady Esclairmonde he would never go near folk in housen; so he had to make shows and shadows for his mind to chew on.’

‘What sort of shows?’ said Dan.

‘Just boy’s Magic as we say. I’ll show you some, some time. It pleased him for the while, and it didn’t hurt any one in particular except a few men coming home late from the taverns. But I knew what it was a sign of, and I followed him like a weasel follows a rabbit. As good a boy as ever lived! I’ve seen him with Sir Huon and the Lady Esclairmonde stepping just as they stepped to avoid the track of Cold Iron in a furrow, or walking wide of some old ash-tot because a man had left his swop-hook or spade there; and all his heart aching to go straightforward among folk in housen all the time. Oh, a good boy! They always intended a fine fortune for him—but they could never find it in their heart to let him begin. I’ve heard that many warned them, but they wouldn’t be warned. So it happened as it happened.

‘One hot night I saw the Boy roving about here wrapped in his flaming discontents. There was flash on flash against the clouds, and rush on rush of shadows down the valley till the shaws were full of his hounds giving tongue, and the woodways were packed with his knights in armour riding down into the water-mists—all his own Magic, of course. Behind them you could see great castles lifting slow and splendid on arches of moonshine, with maidens waving their hands at the windows, which all turned into roaring rivers; and then would come the darkness of his own young heart wiping out the whole slateful. But boy’s Magic doesn’t trouble me—or Merlin’s either for that matter. I followed the Boy by the flashes and the whirling wildfire of his discontent, and oh, but I grieved for him! Oh, but I grieved for him! He pounded back and forth like a bullock in a strange pasture—sometimes alone—sometimes waist-deep among his shadow-hounds—sometimes leading his shadow-knights on a hawk-winged horse to rescue his shadow-girls. I never guessed he had such Magic at his command; but it’s often that way with boys.

‘Just when the owl comes home for the second time, I saw Sir Huon and the Lady ride down my Hill, where there’s not much Magic allowed except mine. They were very pleased at the Boy’s Magic—the valley flared with it—and I heard them settling his splendid fortune when they should find it in their hearts to let him go to act and influence among folk in housen. Sir Huon was for making him a great King somewhere or other, and the Lady was for making him a marvellous wise man whom all should praise for his skill and kindness. She was very kind-hearted.

‘Of a sudden we saw the flashes of his discontents turned back on the clouds, and his shadow-hounds stopped baying.

‘“There’s Magic fighting Magic over yonder,” the Lady Esclairmonde cried, reigning up. “Who is against him?”

‘I could have told her, but I did not count it any of my business to speak of Asa Thor’s comings and goings.

‘How did you know?’said Una.

‘A slow North-East wind blew up, sawing and fretting through the oaks in a way I remembered. The wildfire roared up, one last time in one sheet, and snuffed out like a rushlight, and a bucketful of stinging hail fell. We heard the Boy walking in the Long Slip – where I first met you.

‘“Here, oh, come here!” said the Lady Esclairmonde, and stretched out her arms in the dark.

‘He was coming slowly, but he stumbled in the footpath, being, of course, mortal man.

‘“Why, what’s this?” he said to himself. We three heard him.

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‘“Hold, lad, hold! ’Ware Cold Iron!” said Sir Huon, and they two swept down like nightjars, crying as they rode.

‘I ran at their stirrups, but it was too late. We felt that the Boy had touched Cold Iron somewhere in the dark, for the Horses of the Hill shied off, and whipped round, snorting.

‘Then I judged it was time for me to show myself in my own shape; so I did.

‘“Whatever it is,” I said, “he has taken hold of it. Now we must find out whatever it is that he has taken hold of, for that will be his fortune.”

‘“Come here, Robin,” the Boy shouted, as soon as he heard my voice. “I don’t know what I’ve hold of.”

‘“It is in your hands,” I called back. “Tell us if it is hard and cold, with jewels atop. For that will be a King’s Sceptre. “

‘“Not by a furrow-long,” he said, and stooped and tugged in the dark. We heard him.

‘“Has it a handle and two cutting edges?” I called. “For that’ll be a Knight’s Sword.”

‘“No, it hasn’t,” he says. “It’s neither ploughshare, whittle, hook, nor crook, nor aught I’ve yet seen men handle.” By this time he was scratting in the dirt to prise it up.

‘“Whatever it is, you know who put it there, Robin,” said Sir Huon to me, “or you would not ask those questions. You should have told me as soon as you knew.”

‘“What could you or I have done against the Smith that made it and laid it for him to find?” I said, and I whispered Sir Huon what I had seen at the Forge on Thor’s Day, when the babe was first brought to the Hill.

‘“Oh, good-bye, our dreams!” said Sir Huon. “It’s neither sceptre, sword, nor plough! Maybe yet it’s a bookful of learning, bound with iron clasps. There’s a chance for a splendid fortune in that sometimes.”

‘But we knew we were only speaking to comfort ourselves, and the Lady Esclairmonde, having been a woman, said so.

‘“Thur aie! Thor help us!” the Boy called. “It is round, without end, Cold Iron, four fingers wide and a thumb thick, and there is writing on the breadth of it.”

‘“Read the writing if you have the learning,” I called. The darkness had lifted by then, and the owl was out over the fern again.

‘He called back, reading the runes on the iron:

And there he stood, in clear starlight, with a new, heavy, shining slave-ring round his proud neck.

‘“Is this how it goes?” he asked, while the Lady Esclairmonde cried.

‘“That is how it goes,” I said. He hadn’t snapped the catch home yet, though.

‘“What fortune does it mean for him?” said Sir Huon, while the Boy fingered the ring. “You who walk under Cold Iron, you must tell us and teach us.”

‘“Tell I can, but teach I cannot,” I said. “The virtue of the Ring is only that he must go among folk in housen henceforward, doing what they want done, or what he knows they need, all Old England over. Never will he be his own master, nor yet ever any man’s. He will get half he gives, and give twice what he gets, till his life’s last breath; and if he lays aside his load before he draws that last breath, all his work will go for naught.”

‘“Oh, cruel, wicked Thor!” cried the Lady Esclairmonde. “Ah, look see, all of you! The catch is still open! He hasn’t locked it. He can still take it off. He can still come back. Come back!” She went as near as she dared, but she could not lay hands on Cold Iron. The Boy could have taken it off, yes. We waited to see if he would, but he put up his hand, and the snap locked home.

‘“What else could I have done?” said he.

‘“Surely, then, you will do,” I said. “Morning’s coming, and if you three have any farewells to make, make them now, for, after sunrise, Cold Iron must be your master.” ‘So the three sat down, cheek by wet cheek, telling over their farewells till morning light. As good a boy as ever lived, he was.’

‘And what happened to him?’ asked Dan.

‘When morning came, Cold Iron was master of him and his fortune, and he went to work among folk in housen. Presently he came across a maid like-minded with himself, and they were wedded, and had bushels of children, as the saying is. Perhaps you’ll meet some of his breed, this year.’

‘Thank you,’ said Una. ‘But what did the poor Lady Esclairmonde do?’

‘What can you do when Asa Thor lays the Cold Iron in a lad’s path? She and Sir Huon were comforted to think they had given the Boy good store of learning to act and influence on folk in housen. For he was a good boy! Isn’t it getting on for breakfast-time? I’ll walk with you a piece.’

When they were well in the centre of the bone-dry fern, Dan nudged Una, who stopped and put on a boot as quickly as she could. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘you can’t get any Oak, Ash, and Thorn leaves from here, and’—she balanced wildly on one leg—‘I’m standing on Cold Iron. What’ll you do if we don’t go away?’

‘E-eh? Of all mortal impudence!’ said Puck, as Dan, also in one boot, grabbed his sister’s hand to steady himself. He walked round them, shaking with delight. ‘You think I can only work with a handful of dead leaves? This comes of taking away your Doubt and Fear! I’ll show you!’

A minute later they charged into old Hobden at his simple breakfast of cold roast pheasant, shouting that there was a wasps’ nest in the fern which they had nearly stepped on, and asking him to come and smoke it out. ‘It’s too early for wops-nests, an’ I don’t go diggin’ in the Hill, not for shillin’s,’ said the old man placidly. ‘You’ve a thorn in your foot, Miss Una. Sit down, and put on your t’other boot. You’re too old to be caperin’ barefoot on an empty stomach. Stay it with this chicken o’ mine.’

WHEN ALL the Animals lived in Big Nursery, before it was time to go into the Ark, Big Nurse had to brush their hair. She told them to stand still while she did it or it might be the worse for them. So they stood still. The Lion stood still and had his hair brushed into a splendid mane with a blob at the tip of his tail. The Horse stood still, and had his hair brushed into a beautiful mane and a noble tail. The Cow stood still and had her horns polished, too. The Bear stood still and got a Lick and a Promise. They all stood still, except one Animal, and he wouldn’t. He wiggled and kicked sideways at Big Nurse.

Big Nurse told him, over and over again, that he would not make anything by behaving so. But he said he wasn’t going to stand still for anyone, and he wanted his hair to grow all over him. So, at last, Big Nurse washed her hands of him and said: ‘On-your-own-head-be-it-and-all-over-you! ‘So, that Animal went away, and his hair grew and grew — on his own head it was and all over him — all the while that they were waiting to go into the Ark. And the more it grew, the longer, the harder, the harsher, and the pricklier it grew, till, at last, it was all long spines and jabby quills. On his own head it was and all over him, and particularly on his tail! So they called him Porcupine and stood him in the corner till the Ark was ready.

Then they all went into the Ark, two by two; but not one wanted to go in with Porcupine on account of his spines, except one small brother of his called Hedgehog who always stood still to have his hair brushed (he wore it short), and Porcupine hated him.

Their cabin was on the orlop-deck — the lowest — which was reserved for the Nocturnal Mammalia, such as Bats, Badgers, Lemurs, Bandi-coots and Myoptics at large. Noah’s second son, Ham, was in charge there, because he matched the decoration, being dark-complexioned but very wise.

When the lunch-gong sounded, Ham went down with a basketful of potatoes, carrots, small fruits, grapes, onions and green corn for their lunches.

The first Animal that he found was the small Hedgehog Brother, having the time of his life among the blackbeetles. He said to Ham, ‘I doubt if I would go near Porcupine this morning. The motion has upset him and he’s a little fretful.’

Ham said: ‘Dunno anything about that. My job is to feed ’em.’ So he went into Porcupine’s cabin, where Porcupine was taking up all the room in the world in his bunk, and his quills rattling like a loose window in a taxi.

Ham gave him three sweet potatoes, six inches of sugarcane, and two green corn-cobs. When he had finished, Ham said: ‘Don’t you ever say ‘thank-you’ for anything?’ ‘Yes,’ said Porcupine. ‘This is my way of saying it.’ And he swung round and slapped and swished with his tail sideways at Ham’s bare right leg and made it bleed from the ankle to the knee.

Ham hopped up on deck, with his foot in his hand, and found Father Noah at the wheel.

‘What do you want on the bridge at this hour of high noon?’ said Noah.

Ham said, ‘I want a large tin of Ararat biscuits.’

‘For what and what for?’ said Noah.

‘Because something on the orlop-deck thinks he can teach something about porcupines,’ said Ham. ‘I want to show him.’

‘Then why waste biscuits?’ said Noah.

‘Law!’ said Ham. ‘I only done ask for the largest lid offen the largest box of Ararat biscuits on the boat.’

‘Speak to your Mother,’ said Noah. ‘She issues the stores.’

So Ham’s Mother, Mrs. Noah, gave him the largest lid of the very largest box of Ararat biscuits in the Ark as well as some biscuits for himself; and Ham went down to the orlop-deck with the box-lid held low in his dark right hand, so that it covered his dark right leg from the knee to the ankle.

‘Here’s something I forgot,’ said Ham and he held out an Ararat biscuit to Porcupine, and Porcupine ate it quick.

‘Now say ‘Thank-you,’ ‘ said Ham.

‘I will,’ said Porcupine, and he whipped round, swish, with his wicked tail and hit the biscuit-tin. And that did him no good. ‘Try again,’ said Ham, and Porcupine swished and slapped with his tail harder than ever. ‘Try again,’ said Ham. This time the Porcupine swished so hard that his quill-ends jarred on his skin inside him, and some of the quills broke off short.

Then Ham sat down on the other bunk and said, ‘Listen! Just because a man looks a little sunburned and talks a little chuffy, don’t you think you can be fretful with him. I am Ham! The minute that this Dhow touches Mount Ararat, I shall be Emperor of Africa from the Bayuda Bend to the Bight of Benin, and from the Bight of Benin to Dar-es-Salam, and Dar-es-Salam to the Drakensberg, and from the Drakensberg to where the Two Seas meet round the same Cape. I shall be Sultan of Sultans, Paramount Chief of all Indunas, Medicine Men, and Rain-doctors, and specially of the Wunungiri — the Porcupine People — who are waiting for you. You will belong to me! You will live in holes and burrows and old diggings all up and down Africa; and if I ever hear of you being fretful again I will tell my Wunungiri, and they will come down after you underground, and pull you out backwards. I — amm — Hamm!’

Porcupine was so frightened at this that he stopped rattling his quills under the bunk and lay quite still.

Then the small Hedgehog Brother who was under the bunk too, having the time of his life among the blackbeetles there, said: ‘This doesn’t look rosy for me. After all, I’m his brother in a way of speaking, and I suppose I shall have to go along with him underground, and I can’t dig for nuts!’

‘Not in the least,’ said Ham. ‘On his own head it was and all over him, just as Big Nurse said. But you stood still to have your hair brushed. Besides, you aren’t in my caravan. As soon as this old bugga-low (he meant the Ark) touches Ararat, I go South and East with my little lot — Elephants and Lions and things – and Porcupig — and scatter ’em over Africa. You’ll go North and West with one or other of my Brothers (I’ve forgotten which), and you’ll fetch up in a comfy little place called England — all among gardens and box-borders and slugs, where people will be glad to see you. And you will be a lucky little fellow always.’

‘Thank you, Sir,’ said the small Hedgehog Brother. ‘But what about my living underground? That isn’t my line of country.’

‘Not the least need,’ said Ham. And he touched the small Hedgehog Brother with his foot, and Hedgehog curled up — which he had never done before.

‘Now you’ll be able to pick up your own dry-leaf-bedding on your own prickles so as you can lie warm in a hedge from October till April if you like. Nobody will bother you except the gipsies; and you’ll be no treat to any dog.’

‘Thank you, Sir,’ said small Hedgehog Brother, and he uncurled himself and went after more blackbeetles.

And it all happened just as Ham said.

I don’t know how the keepers at the Zoo feed Porcupine but, from that day to this, every keeper that I have ever seen feed a porcupine in Africa, takes care to have the lid of a biscuit-box held low in front of his right leg so that Porcupine can’t get in a swish with his tail at it, after he has had his lunch.

Palaver done set! Go and have your hair brushed!

©The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty

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IT had been raining heavily for one whole month—raining on a camp of thirty thousand men, thousands of camels, elephants, horses, bullocks, and mules, all gathered together at a place called Rawalpindi, to be reviewed by the Viceroy of India. He was receiving a visit from the Amir of Afghanistan—a wild king of a very wild country; and the Amir had brought with him for a bodyguard eight hundred men and horses who had never seen a camp or a locomotive before in their lives—savage men and savage horses from somewhere at the back of Central Asia. Every night a mob of these horses would be sure to break their heel-ropes, and stampede up and down the camp through the mud in the dark, or the camels would break loose and run about and fall over the ropes of the tents, and you can imagine how pleasant that was for men trying to go to sleep. My tent lay far away from the camel-lines, and I thought it was safe; but one night a man popped his head in and shouted, ‘Get out, quick! They’re coming! My tent’s gone!’

I knew who ‘they’ were; so I put on my boots and waterproof and scuttled out into the slush. Little Vixen, my fox-terrier, went out through the other side; and then there was a roaring and a grunting and bubbling, and I saw the tent cave in, as the pole snapped, and begin to dance about like a mad ghost. A camel had blundered into it, and wet and angry as I was, I could not help laughing. Then I ran on, because I did not know how many camels might have got loose, and before long I was out of sight of the camp, ploughing my way through the mud.

At last I fell over the tail-end of a gun, and by that knew I was somewhere near the Artillery lines where the cannon were stacked at night. As I did not want to plowter about any more in the drizzle and the dark, I put my waterproof over the muzzle of one gun, and made a sort of wigwam with two or three rammers that I found, and lay along the tail of another gun, wondering where Vixen had got to, and where I might be.

Just as I was getting ready to sleep I heard a jingle of harness and a grunt, and a mule passed me shaking his wet ears. He belonged to a screw-gun battery, for I could hear the rattle of the straps and rings and chains and things on his saddle-pad. The screw-guns are tiny little cannon made in two pieces that are screwed together when the time comes to use them. They are taken up mountains, anywhere that a mule can find a road, and they are very useful for fighting in rocky country.

Behind the mule there was a camel, with his big soft feet squelching and slipping in the mud, and his neck bobbing to and fro like a strayed hen’s. Luckily, I knew enough of beast language—not wild-beast language, but camp-beast language, of course—from the natives to know what he was saying.

He must have been the one that flopped into my tent, for he called to the mule, ‘What shall I, do? Where shall I go? I have fought with a white thing that waved, and it took a stick and hit me on the neck.’ (That was my broken tentpole, and I was very glad to know it.) ‘Shall we run on?’

‘Oh, it was you,’ said the mule, ‘you and your friends, that have been disturbing the camp? All right. You’ll be beaten for this in the morning; but I may as well give you something on account now.’

I heard the harness jingle as the mule backed and caught the camel two kicks in the ribs that rang like a drum. ‘Another time,’ he said, ‘you’ll know better than to run through a mule-battery at night, shouting “Thieves and fire!” Sit down, and keep your silly neck quiet.’

The camel doubled up camel-fashion, like a two-foot rule, and sat down whimpering. There was a regular beat of hoofs in the darkness, and a big troop-horse cantered up as steadily as though he were on parade, jumped a gun-tail, and landed close to the mule.

‘It’s disgraceful,’ he said, blowing out his nostrils. ‘Those camels have racketed through our lines again—the third time this week. How’s a horse to keep his condition if he isn’t allowed to sleep. Who’s here?’

‘I’m the breech-piece mule of Number Two gun of the First Screw Battery,’ said the mule, ‘and the other’s one of your friends. He’s waked me up too. Who are you?’

‘Number Fifteen, E troop, Ninth Lancers—Dick Cunliffe’s horse. Stand over a little, there.’

‘Oh, beg your pardon,’ said the mule. ‘It’s too dark to see much. Aren’t these camels too sickening for anything? I walked out of my lines to get a little peace and quiet here.’

‘My lords,’ said the camel humbly, ‘we dreamed bad dreams in the night, and we were very much afraid. I am only a baggage-camel of the 39th Native Infantry, and I am not so brave as you are, my lords.’

‘Then why the pickets didn’t you stay and carry baggage for the 39th Native Infantry, instead of running all round the camp?’ said the mule.

‘They were such very bad dreams,’ said the camel. ‘I am sorry. Listen! What is that? Shall we run on again?’

‘Sit down,’ said the mule, ‘or you’ll snap your long legs between the guns.’ He cocked one ear and listened. ‘Bullocks!’ he said. ‘Gun-bullocks. On my word, you and your friends have waked the camp very thoroughly. It takes a good deal of prodding to put up a gun-bullock.’

I heard a chain dragging along the ground, and a yoke of the great sulky white bullocks that drag the heavy siege-guns when the elephants won’t go any nearer to the firing, came shouldering along together; and almost stepping on the chain was another battery-mule, calling wildly for ‘Billy.’

‘That’s one of our recruits,’ said the old mule to the troop-horse. ‘He’s calling for me. Here, youngster, stop squealing. The dark never hurt anybody yet.’

The gun-bullocks lay down together and began chewing the cud, but the young mule huddled close to Billy.

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‘Things!’ he said. ‘Fearful and horrible things, Billy! They came into our lines while we were asleep. D’you think they’ll kill us?’

‘I’ve a great mind to give you a number-one kicking,’ said Billy. ‘The idea of a fourteen-hand mule with your training disgracing the battery before this gentleman!’

‘Gently, gently!’ said the troop-horse. ‘Remember they are always like this to begin with. The first time I ever saw a man (it was in Australia when I was a three-year-old) I ran for half a day, and if I’d seen a camel I should have been running still.’

Nearly all our horses for the English cavalry are brought to India from Australia, and are broken in by the troopers themselves.

‘True enough,’ said Billy. ‘Stop shaking, youngster. The first time they put the full harness with all its chains on my back, I stood on my forelegs and kicked every bit of it off. I hadn’t learned the real science of kicking then, but the battery said they had never seen anything like it.’

‘But this wasn’t harness or anything that jingled,’ said the young mule. ‘You know I don’t mind that now, Billy. It was Things like trees, and they fell up and down the lines and bubbled; and my head-rope broke, and I couldn’t find my driver, and I couldn’t find you, Billy, so I ran off with—with these gentlemen.’

‘H’m!’ said Billy. ‘As soon as I heard the camels were loose I came away on my own account, quietly. When a battery—a screw-gun mule calls gun-bullocks gentlemen, he must be very badly shaken up. Who are you fellows on the ground there?’

The gun-bullocks rolled their suds, and answered both together: ‘The seventh yoke of the first gun of the Big Gun Battery. We were asleep when the camels came, but when we were trampled on we got up and walked away. It is better to lie quiet in the mud than to be disturbed on good bedding. We told your friend here that there was nothing to be afraid of, but he knew so much that he thought otherwise. Wah!’

They went on chewing.

‘That comes of being afraid,’ said Billy. ‘You get laughed at by gun-bullocks. I hope you like it, young un.’

The young mule’s teeth snapped, and I heard him say something about not being afraid of any beefy old bullock in the world; but the bullocks only clicked their horns together and went on chewing.

‘Now, don’t be angry after you’ve been afraid. That’s the worst kind of cowardice,’ said the troop-horse. ‘Anybody can be forgiven for being scared in the night, I think, if they see things they don’t understand. We’ve broken out of our pickets, again and again, four hundred and fifty of us, just because a new recruit got to telling tales of whip-snakes at home in Australia till we were scared to death of the loose ends of our headropes.’

‘That’s all very well in camp,’ said Billy; ‘I’m not above stampeding myself, for the fun of the thing, when I haven’t been out for a day or two; but what do you do on active service?’

‘Oh, that’s quite another set of new shoes,’ said the troop-horse. ‘Dick Cunliffe’s on my back then, and drives his knees into me, and all I have to do is to watch where I am putting my feet and to keep my hind legs well under me, and be bridle-wise.’

‘What’s bridle-wise?’ said the young mule.

‘By the Blue Gums of the Back Blocks,’ snorted the troop-horse, ‘do you mean to say that you aren’t taught to be bridle-wise in your business? How can you do anything, unless you can spin round at once when the rein is pressed on your neck? It means life or death to your man, and of course that’s life or death to you. Get round with your hind legs under you the instant you feel the rein on your neck. If you haven’t room to swing round, rear up a little and come round on your hind legs. That’s being bridlewise.’

‘We aren’t taught that way,’ said Billy the mule stiffly. ‘We’re taught to obey the man at our head: step off when he says so, and step in when he says so. I suppose it comes to the same thing. Now, with all this fine fancy business and rearing, which must be very bad for your hocks, what do you do?’

‘That depends,’ said the troop-horse. ‘Generally I have to go in among a lot of yelling, hairy men with knives,—long shiny knives, worse than the farrier’s knives,—and I have to take care that Dick’s boot is just touching the next man’s boot without crushing it. I can see Dick’s lance to the right of my right eye, and I know I am safe. I shouldn’t care to be the man or horse that stood up to Dick and me when we’re in a hurry.’

‘Don’t the knives hurt?’ said the young mule.

‘Well, I got one cut across the chest once, but that wasn’t Dick’s fault——’

‘A lot I should have cared whose fault it was, if it hurt!’ said the young mule.

‘You must,’ said the troop-horse. ‘If you don’t trust your man, you may as well run away at once. That’s what some of our horses do, and I don’t blame them. As I was saying, it wasn’t Dick’s fault. The man was lying on the ground, and I stretched myself not to tread on him, and he slashed up at me. Next time I have to go over a man lying down I shall step on him—hard.’

‘H’m!’ said Billy; ‘it sounds very foolish. Knives are dirty things at any time. The proper thing to do is to climb up a mountain with a well-balanced saddle, hang on by all four feet and your ears too, and creep and crawl and wriggle along, till you come out hundreds of feet above any one else, on a ledge where there’s just room enough for your hoofs. Then you stand still and keep quiet,—never ask a man to hold your head, young un,—keep quiet while the guns are being put together, and then you watch the little poppy shells drop down into the tree-tops ever so far below.’

‘Don’t you ever trip?’ said the troop-horse.

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‘They say that when a mule trips you can split a hen’s ear,’ said Billy. ‘Now and again per-haps a badly packed saddle will upset a mule, but it’s very seldom. I wish I could show you our business. It’s beautiful. Why, it took me three years to find out what the men were driving at. The science of the thing is never to show up against the skyline, because, if you do, you may get fired at. Remember that, young un. Always keep hidden as much as possible, even if you have to go a mile out of your way. I lead the battery when it comes to that sort of climbing.’

‘Fired at without the chance of running into the people who are firing!’ said the troop-horse, thinking hard. ‘I couldn’t stand that. I should want to charge, with Dick.’

‘Oh no, you wouldn’t; you know that as soon as the guns are in position they’ll do all the charging. That’s scientific and neat; but knives—pah!’

The baggage-camel had been bobbing his head to and fro for some time past, anxious to get a word in edgeways. Then I heard him say, as he cleared his throat, nervously:—

‘I—I—I have fought a little, but not in that climbing way or that running way.’

‘No. Now you mention it,’ said Billy, ‘you don’t look as though you were made for climbing or running-much. Well, how was it, old Haybales?’

‘The proper way,’ said the camel. ‘We all sat down——’

‘Oh, my cropper and breastplate!’ said the troop-horse under his breath. ‘Sat down?’

‘We sat down—a hundred of us,’ the camel went on, ‘in a big square, and the men piled our packs and saddles outside the square, and they fired over our backs, the men did, on all sides of the square.’

‘What sort of men? Any men that came along?’ said the troop-horse. ‘They teach us in riding-school to lie down and let our masters fire across us, but Dick Cunliffe is the only man I’d trust to do that. It tickles my girths, and, besides, I can’t see with my head on the ground.’

‘What does it matter who fires across you?’ said the camel. ‘There are plenty of men and plenty of other camels close by, and a great many clouds of smoke. I am not frightened then. I sit still and wait.’

‘And yet,’ said Billy, ‘you dream bad dreams and upset the camp at night. Well! well! Before I’d lie down, not to speak of sitting down, and let a man fire across me, my heels and his head would have something to say to each other. Did you ever hear anything so awful as that?’

There was a long silence, and then one of the gun-bullocks lifted up his big head and said, ‘This is very foolish indeed. There is only one way of fighting.’

‘Oh, go on,’ said Billy. ‘Please don’t mind me. I suppose you fellows fight standing on your tails?’

‘Only one way,’ said the two together. (They must have been twins.) ‘This is that way. To put all twenty yoke of us to the big gun as soon as Two Tails trumpets.’ (‘Two Tails’ is camp slang for the elephant.)

‘What does Two Tails trumpet for?’ said the young mule.

‘To show that he is not going any nearer to the smoke on the other side. Two Tails is a great coward. Then we tug the big gun all together—Heya—Hullah! Heeyah! Hullah! We do not climb like cats nor run like calves. We go across the level plain, twenty yoke of us, till we are unyoked again, and we graze while the big guns talk across the plain to some town with mud walls, and pieces of the wall fall out, and the dust goes up as though many cattle were coming home.’

‘Oh ! And you choose that time for grazing, do you?’ said the young mule.

‘That time or any other. Eating is always good. We eat till we are yoked up again and tug the gun back to where Two Tails is waiting for it. Sometimes there are big guns in the city that speak back, and some of us are killed, and then there is all the more grazing for those that are left. This is Fate—nothing but Fate. None the less, Two Tails is a great coward. That is the proper way to fight. We are brothers from Hapur. Our father was a sacred bull of Shiva. We have spoken.’

‘Well, I’ve certainly learned something tonight,’ said the troop-horse. ‘Do you gentlemen of the screw-gun battery feel inclined to eat when you are being fired at with big guns, and Two Tails is behind you?’

‘About as much as we feel inclined to sit down and let men sprawl all over us, or run into people with knives. I never heard such stuff. A mountain ledge, a well-balanced load, a driver you can trust to let you pick your own way, and I’m your mule; but the other things—no!’ said Billy, with a stamp of his foot.

‘Of course,’ said the troop-horse, ‘every one is not made in the same way, and I can quite see that your family, on your father’s side, would fail to understand a great many things.’

‘Never you mind my family on my father’s side,’ said Billy angrily, for every mule hates to be reminded that his father was a donkey. ‘My father was a Southern gentleman, and he could pull down and bite and kick into rags every horse he came across. Remember that, you big brown Brumby!’

Brumby means wild horse without any breeding. Imagine the feelings of Sunol if a car-horse called her a ‘skate,’ and you can imagine how the Australian horse felt. I saw the white of his eye glitter in the dark.

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‘See here, you son of an imported Malaga jackass,’ he said between his teeth. ‘I’d have you know that I’m related on my mother’s side to Carbine, winner of the Melbourne Cup; and where I come from we aren’t accustomed to being ridden over roughshod by any parrot-mouthed, pig-headed mule in a pop-gun pea-shooter battery. Are you ready?’

‘On your hind legs!’ squealed Billy. They both reared up facing each other, and I was expecting a furious fight, when a gurgly, rumbly voice called out of the darkness to the right: ‘Children, what are you fighting about there? Be quiet.’

Both beasts dropped down with a snort of disgust, for neither horse nor mule can bear to listen to an elephant’s voice.

‘It’s Two Tails!’ said the troop-horse. ‘I can’t stand him. A tail at each end isn’t fair!’

‘My feelings exactly,’ said Billy, crowding into the troop-horse for company. ‘We’re very alike in some things.’

‘I suppose we’ve inherited them from our mothers,’ said the troop-horse. ‘It’s not worth quarrelling about. Hi! Two Tails, are you tied up?’

‘Yes,’ said Two Tails, with a laugh all up his trunk. ‘I’m picketed for the night. I’ve heard what you fellows have been saying. But don’t be afraid. I’m not coming over.’

The bullocks and the camel said, half aloud: ‘Afraid of Two Tails—what nonsense!’ And the bullocks went on: ‘We are sorry that you heard, but it is true. Two Tails, why are you afraid of the guns when they fire?’

‘Well,’ said Two Tails, rubbing one hind leg against the other, exactly like a little boy saying poetry, ‘I don’t quite know whether you’d understand.’

‘We don’t, but we have to pull the guns,’ said the bullocks.

‘I know it, and I know you are a good deal braver than you think you are. But it’s different with me. My battery captain called me a Pachydermatous Anachronism the other day.’

‘That’s another way of fighting, I suppose?’ said Billy, who was recovering his spirits.

‘You don’t know what that means, of course, but I do. It means betwixt and between, and that is just where I am. I can see inside my head what will happen when a shell bursts; and you bullocks can’t.’

‘I can,’ said the troop-horse. ‘At least a little bit. I try not to think about it.’

‘I can see more than you, and I do think about it. I know there’s a great deal of me to take care of, and I know that nobody knows how to cure me when I’m sick. All they can do is to stop my driver’s pay till I get well, and I can’t trust my driver.’

‘Ah!’ said the troop-horse. ‘That explains it. I can trust Dick.’

‘You could put a whole regiment of Dicks on my back without making me feel any better. I know just enough to be uncomfortable, and not enough to go on in spite of it.’

‘We do not understand,’ said the bullocks.

‘I know you don’t. I’m not talking to you. You don’t know what blood is.’

‘We do,’ said the bullocks. ‘It is red stuff that soaks into the ground and smells.’

The troop-horse gave a kick and a bound and a snort.

‘Don’t talk of it,’ he said. ‘I can smell it now, just thinking of it. It makes me want to run—when I haven’t Dick on my back.’

‘But it is not here,’ said the camel and the bullocks. ‘Why are you so stupid?’

‘It’s vile stuff,’ said Billy. ‘I don’t want to run, but I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘There you are!’ said Two Tails, waving his tail to explain.

‘Surely. Yes, we have been here all night,’ said the bullocks.

Two Tails stamped his foot till the iron ring on it jingled. ‘Oh, I’m not talking to you. You can’t see inside your heads.’

‘No. We see out of our four eyes,’ said the bullocks. ‘We see straight in front of us.’

‘If I could do that and nothing else you wouldn’t be needed to pull the big guns at all. If I was like my captain—he can see things inside his head before the firing begins, and he shakes all over, but he knows too much to run away—if I was like him I could pull the guns. But if I were as wise as all that I should never be here. I should be a king in the forest, as I used to be, sleeping half the day and bathing when I liked. I haven’t had a good bath for a month.’

‘That’s all very fine,’ said Billy; ‘but giving a thing a long name doesn’t make it any better.’

‘H’sh!’ said the troop-horse. ‘I think I understand what Two Tails means.’

‘You’ll understand better in a minute,’ said Two Tails angrily. ‘Now, just you explain to me why you don’t like this!’

He began trumpeting furiously at the top of his trumpet.

‘Stop that!’ said Billy and the troop-horse together, and I could hear them stamp and shiver. An elephant’s trumpeting is always nasty, especially on a dark night.

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‘I shan’t stop,’ said Two Tails. ‘Won’t you explain that, please? Hhrrmph! Rrrt! Rrrmph! Rrrhha!’ Then he stopped suddenly, and I heard a little whimper in the dark, and knew that Vixen had found me at last. She knew as well as I did that if there is one thing in the world the elephant is more afraid of than another, it is a little barking dog; so she stopped to bully Two Tails in his pickets, and yapped round his big feet. Two Tails shuffled and squeaked. ‘Go away, little dog!’ he said. ‘Dont snuff at my ankles, or I’ll kick at you. Good little dog—nice little doggie, then! Go home, you yelping little beast! Oh, why doesn’t someone take her away? She’ll bite me in a minute.’

‘Seems to me,’ said Billy to the troop-horse, ‘that our friend Two Tails is afraid of most things. Now, if I had a full meal for every dog I’ve kicked across the parade-ground, I should be nearly as fat as Two Tails.’

I whistled, and Vixen ran up to me, muddy all over, and licked my nose, and told me a long tale about hunting for me all through the camp. I never let her know that I understood beast talk, or she would have taken all sorts of liberties. So I buttoned her into the breast of my overcoat, and Two Tails shuffled and stamped and growled to himself.

‘Extraordinary! Most extraordinary!’ he said. ‘It runs in our family. Now, where has that nasty little beast gone to?’

I heard him feeling about with his trunk.

‘We all seem to be affected in various ways,’ he went on, blowing his nose. ‘Now, you gentlemen were alarmed, I believe, when I trumpeted.’

‘Not alarmed, exactly,’ said the troop-horse, ‘but it made me feel as though I had hornets where my saddle ought to be. Don’t begin again.’

‘I’m frightened of a little dog, and the camel here is frightened by bad dreams in the night.’

‘It is very lucky for us that we haven’t all got to fight in the same way,’ said the troop-horse.

‘What I want to know,’ said the young mule, who had been quiet for a long time—‘what I want to know is, why we have to fight at all.’

‘Because we’re told to,’ said the troop-horse, with a snort of contempt.

‘Orders,’ said Billy the mule; and his teeth snapped.

‘Hukm hai! [It is an order],’ said the camel with a gurgle; and Two Tails and the bullocks repeated, ‘Hukm hai!’

‘Yes, but who gives the orders?’ said the recruit-mule.

‘The man who walks at your head—Or sits on your back—Or holds your nose-rope—Or twists your tail,’ said Billy and the troop-horse and the camel and the bullocks one after the other.

‘But who gives them the orders?’

‘Now you want to know too much, young un,’ said Billy, ‘and that is one way of getting kicked. All you have to do is to obey the man at your head and ask no questions.’

‘He’s quite right,’ said Two Tails. ‘I can’t always obey, because I’m betwixt and between; but Billy’s right. Obey the man next to you who gives the order, or you’ll stop all the battery, besides getting a thrashing.’

The gun-bullocks got up to go. ‘Morning is coming,’ they said. ‘We will go back to our lines. It is true that we see only out of our eyes, and we are not very clever; but still, we are the only people to-night who have not been afraid. Good night, you brave people.’

Nobody answered, and the troop-horse said, to change the conversation, ‘Where’s that little dog? A dog means a man somewhere about.’

‘Here I am,’ yapped Vixen, ‘under the guntail with my man. You big, blundering beast of a camel, you, you upset our tent. My man’s very angry.’

‘Phew!’ said the bullocks. ‘He must be white!’

‘Of course he is,’ said Vixen. ‘Do you suppose I’m looked after by a black bullock-driver?’

‘Huah! Ouach! Ugh!’ said the bullocks. ‘Let us get away quickly.’

They plunged forward in the mud, and managed somehow to run their yoke on the pole of an ammunition-wagon, where it jammed.

‘Now you have done it,’ said Billy calmly. ‘Don’t struggle. You’re hung up till daylight. What on earth’s the matter?’

The bullocks went off into the long, hissing snorts that Indian cattle give, and pushed and crowded and slued and stamped and slipped and nearly fell down in the mud, grunting savagely.

‘You’ll break your necks in a minute,’ said the troop-horse. ‘What’s the matter with white men? I live with ’em.’

‘They—eat—us! Pull!’ said the near bullock: the yoke snapped with a twang, and they lumbered off together.

I never knew before what made Indian cattle so scared of Englishmen. We eat beef—a thing that no cattle-driver touches—and of course the cattle do not like it.

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‘May I be flogged with my own pad-chains! Who’d have thought of two big lumps like those losing their heads?’ said Billy.

‘Never mind. I’m going to look at this man. Most of the white men, I know, have things in their pockets,’ said the troop-horse.

‘I’ll leave you, then. I can’t say I’m over-fond of ’em myself. Besides, white men who haven’t a place to sleep in are more than likely to be thieves, and I’ve a good deal of Government property on my back. Come along; young un, and we’ll go back to our lines. Good night, Australia! See you on parade to-morrow, I suppose. Good night old Hay-bales!—try to control your feelings, won’t you? Good night, Two Tails! If you pass us on the ground to-morrow, don’t trumpet. It spoils our formation.’

Billy the mule stumped off with the swaggering limp of an old campaigner, as the troop-horse’s head came nuzzling into my breast, and I gave him biscuits; while Vixen, who is a most conceited little dog, told him fibs about the scores of horses that she and I kept.

‘I’m coming to the parade to-morrow in my dog-cart,’ she said. ‘Where will you be?’

‘On the left hand of the second squadron. I set the time for all my troop, little lady,’ he said politely. ‘Now I must go back to Dick. My tail’s all muddy, and he’ll have two hours’ hard work dressing me for parade.’

The big parade of all the thirty thousand men was held that afternoon, and Vixen and I had a good place close to the Viceroy and the Amir of Afghanistan, with his high, big black hat of astrakhan wool and the great diamond star in the centre. The first part of the review was all sunshine, and the regiments went by in wave upon wave of legs all moving together, and guns all in a line, till our eyes grew dizzy. Then the cavalry came up, to the beautiful cavalry canter of ‘Bonnie Dundee,’ and Vixen cocked her ear where she sat on the dog-cart. The second squadron of the Lancers shot by, and there was the troop-horse, with his tail like spun silk, his head pulled into his breast, one ear forward and one back, setting the time for all his squadron, his legs going as smoothly as waltz-music. Then the big guns came by, and I saw Two Tails and two other elephants harnessed in line to a forty-pounder siege-gun, while twenty yoke of oxen walked behind. The seventh pair had a new yoke, and they looked rather stiff and tired. Last came the screw-guns, and Billy the mule carried himself as though he commanded all the troops, and his harness was oiled and polished till it winked. I gave a cheer all by myself for Billy the mule, but he never looked right or left.

The rain began to fall again, and for a while it was too misty to see what the troops were doing. They had made a big half-circle across the plain, and were spreading out into a line. That line grew and grew and grew till it was three-quarters of a mile long from wing to wing—one solid wall of men, horses, and guns. Then it came on straight toward the Viceroy and the Amir, and as it got nearer the ground began to shake, like the deck of a steamer when the engines are going fast.

Unless you have been there you cannot imagine what a frightening effect this steady come-down of troops has on the spectators, even when they know it is only a review. I looked at the Amir. Up till then he had not shown the shadow of a sign of astonishment or anything else; but now his eyes began to get bigger and bigger, and he picked up the reins on his horse’s neck and looked behind him. For a minute it seemed as though he were going to draw his sword and slash his way out through the English men and women in the carriages at the back. Then the advance stopped dead, the ground stood still, the whole line saluted, and thirty bands began to play all together. That was the end of the review, and the regiments went off to their camps in the rain; and an infantry band struck up:—

The animals went in two by two,
Hurrah!
The animals went in two by two,
The elephant and the battery mu-
1’, and they all got into the Ark
For to get out of the rain!

Then I heard an old grizzled, long-haired Central Asian chief, who had come down with the Amir, asking questions of a native officer.

‘Now,’ said he, ‘in what manner was this wonderful thing done?’

And the officer answered, ‘There was an order, and they obeyed.’

‘But are the beasts as wise as the men?’ said the chief.

‘They obey, as the men do. Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three regiments, and the brigadier his general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress. Thus it is done.’

‘Would it were so in Afghanistan!’ said the chief; ‘for there we obey only our own wills.’

‘And for that reason,’ said the native officer, twirling his moustache, ‘your Amir whom you do not obey must come here and take orders from our Viceroy.’

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The stream is shrunk—the pool is dry,
And we be comrades, thou and I;
With fevered jowl and dusty flank
Each jostling each along the bank;
And by one drouthy fear made still,
Forgoing thought of quest or kill.
Now ’neath his dam the fawn may see,
The lean Pack-wolf as cowed as he,
And the tall buck, unflinching, note
The fangs that tore his father’s throat.
The pools are shrunk—the streams are dry,
And we be playmates, thou and I,
Till yonder cloud—Good Hunting!—loose
The rain that breaks our Water Truce.

THE Law of the Jungle—which is by far the oldest law in the world—has arranged for almost every kind of accident that may befall the Jungle People till now its code is as perfect as time and custom can make it. You will remember
that Mowgli spent a great part of his life in the Seeonee Wolf-Pack, learning the Law from Baloo, the Brown Bear; and it was Baloo who told him, when the boy grew impatient at the constant orders, that the Law was like the Giant Creeper, because it dropped across every one’s back and no one could escape. ‘When thou hast lived as long as I have, Little Brother, thou wilt see how all the Jungle obeys at least one Law. And that will be no pleasant sight,’ said Baloo.

This talk went in at one ear and out at the other, for a boy who spends his life eating and sleeping does not worry about anything till it actually stares him in the face. But, one year, Baloo’s words came true, and Mowgli saw all the Jungle working under the Law.

It began when the winter Rains failed almost entirely, and Ikki, the Porcupine, meeting Mowgli in a bamboo-thicket, told him that the wild yams were drying up. Now everybody knows that Ikki is ridiculously fastidious in his choice of food, and will eat nothing but the very best and ripest. So Mowgli laughed and said, ‘What is that to me?’

‘Not much now,’ said Ikki, rattling his quills in a stiff, uncomfortable way, ‘but later we shall see. Is there any more diving into the deep rockpool below the Bee-Rocks, Little Brother?’

‘No. The foolish water is going all away, and I do not wish to break my head,’ said Mowgli, who, in those days, was quite sure that he knew as much as any five of the Jungle People put together.

‘That is thy loss. A small crack might let in some wisdom.’ Ikki ducked quickly to prevent Mowgli from pulling his nose-bristles, and Mowgli told Baloo what Ikki had said. Baloo looked very grave, and mumbled half to himself: ‘If I were alone I would change my hunting-grounds now, before the others began to think. And yet—hunting among strangers ends in fighting; and they might hurt the Man-cub. We must wait and see how the mohwa blooms.’

That spring the mohwa tree, that Baloo was so fond of, never flowered. The greeny, cream-coloured, waxy blossoms were heat-killed before they were born, and only a few bad-smelling petals came down when he, stood on his hind legs and shook the tree. Then, inch by inch, the untempered heat crept into the heart of the Jungle, turning it yellow, brown, and at last black. The green growths in the sides of the ravines burned up to broken wires and curled films of dead stuff; the hidden pools sank down and caked over, keeping the last least footmark on their edges as if it had been cast in iron; the juicy-stemmed creepers fell away from the trees they clung to and died at their feet; the bamboos withered, clanking when the hot winds blew, and the moss peeled off the rocks deep in the jungle, till they were as bare and as hot as the quivering blue boulders in the bed of the stream.

The birds and the monkey-people went north early in the year, for they knew what was coming; and the deer and the wild pig broke far away to the perished fields of the villages, dying sometimes before the eyes of men too weak to kill them. Chil, the Kite, stayed and grew fat, for there was a great deal of carrion, and evening after evening he brought the news to the beasts, too weak to force their way to fresh hunting-grounds, that the sun was killing the Jungle for three days’ flight in every direction.

Mowgli, who had never known what real hunger meant, fell back on stale honey, three years old, scraped out of deserted rock-hives—honey black as a sloe, and dusty with dried sugar. He hunted, too, for deep-boring grubs under the bark of the trees, and robbed the wasps of their new broods. All the game in the Jungle was no more than skin and bone, and Bagheera could kill thrice in a night, and hardly get a full meal. But the want of water was the worst, for though the Jungle People drink seldom they must drink deep.

And the heat went on and on, and sucked up all the moisture, till at last the main channel of the Waingunga was the only stream that carried trickle of water between its dead banks; and when Hathi, the wild elephant, who lives for a hundred years and more, saw a long, lean blue ridge of rock show dry in the very centre of the stream, he knew that he was looking at the Peace Rock, and then and there he lifted up his trunk and proclaimed the Water Truce, as his father before him had proclaimed it fifty years ago. The deer, wild pig, and buffalo took up the cry hoarsely; and Chil, the Kite, flew in great circles far and wide, whistling and shrieking the warning.

By the Law of the Jungle it is death to kill at the drinking-places when once the Water Truce has been declared. The reason of this is that drinking comes before eating. Every one in the Jungle can scramble along somehow when only game is scarce; but water is water, and when there is but one source of supply, all hunting stops while the Jungle People go there for their needs. In good seasons, when water was plentiful, those who came down to drink at the Waingunga—or anywhere else, for that matter—did so at the risk of their lives, and that risk made no small part of the fascination of the night’s doings. To move down so cunningly that never a leaf stirred; to wade knee-deep in the roaring shallows that drown all noise from behind; to drink, looking backward over one shoulder, every muscle ready for the first desperate bound of keen terror; to roll on the sandy margin, and return, wet-muzzled and well plumped out, to the admiring herd, was a thing that all tall-antlered young bucks took a delight in, precisely because they knew that at any moment Bagheera or Shere Khan might leap upon them and bear them down. But now all that life-and-death fun was ended, and the Jungle People came up, starved and weary, to the shrunken river,—tiger, bear, deer, buffalo, and pig, all together,—drank the fouled waters, and hung above them, too exhausted to move off.

The deer and the pig had tramped all day in search of something better than dried bark and withered leaves. The buffaloes had found no wallows to be cool in, and no green crops to steal. The snakes had left the Jungle and come down to the river in the hope of finding a stray frog. They curled round wet stones, and never offered to strike when the nose of a rooting pig dislodged them. The river-turtles had long ago been killed by Bagheera, cleverest of hunters, and the fish had buried themselves deep in the dry mud. Only the Peace Rock lay across the shallows like a long snake, and the little tired ripples hissed as they dried on its hot side.

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It was here that Mowgli came nightly for the cool and the companionship. The most hungry of his enemies would hardly have cared for the boy then. His naked hide made him seem more lean and wretched than any of his fellows. His hair was bleached to tow colour by the sun; his ribs stood out like the ribs of a basket, and the lumps on his knees and elbows, where, he was used to track on all fours, gave his shrunken limbs the look of knotted grass-stems. But his eye, under his matted forelock, was cool and quiet, for Bagheera was his adviser in this time of trouble, and told him to go quietly, hunt slowly, and never, on any account, to lose his temper.

‘It is an evil time,’ said the Black Panther, one furnace-hot evening, ‘but it will go if we can live till the end. Is thy stomach full, Man-cub?’

‘There is stuff in my stomach, but I get no good of it. Think you, Bagheera, the Rains have forgotten us and will never come again? ’

‘Not I! We shall see the mohwa in blossom yet, and the little fawns all fat with new grass. Come down to the Peace Rock and hear the news. On my back, Little Brother.’

‘This is no time to carry weight. I can still stand alone, but—indeed we be no fatted bullocks, we two.’

Bagheera looked along his ragged, dusty flank and whispered: ‘Last night I killed a bullock under the yoke. So low was I brought that I think I should not have dared to spring if he had been loose. Wou!’

Mowgli laughed. ‘Yes, we be great hunters now,’ said he. ‘I am very bold—to eat grubs,’ and the two came down together through the crackling undergrowth to the river-bank and the lace-work of shoals that ran out from it in every direction.

‘The water cannot live long,’ said Baloo, joining them. ‘Look across. Yonder are trails like the roads of Man.’

On the level plain of the farther bank the stiff jungle-grass had died standing, and, dying, had mummied. The beaten tracks of the deer and the pig, all heading toward the river, had striped that colourless plain with dusty gullies driven through the ten-foot grass, and, early as it was, each long avenue was full of first-comers hastening to the water. You could hear the does and fawns coughing in the snuff-like dust.

Up-stream, at the bend of the sluggish pool round the Peace Rock, and Warden of the Water Truce, stood Hathi, the wild elephant, with his sons, gaunt and gray in the moonlight, rocking to and fro—always rocking. Below him a little were the vanguard of the deer; below these, again, the pig and the wild buffalo; and on the opposite bank, where the tall trees came down to the water’s edge, was the place set apart for the Eaters of Flesh—the tiger, the wolves, the panther, the bear, and, the others.

‘We are under one Law, indeed,’ said Bagheera, wading into the water and looking across at the lines of clicking horns and starting eyes where the deer and the pig pushed each other to and fro. ‘Good hunting, all you of my blood,’ he added, lying down at full length, one flank thrust out of the shallows; and then, between his teeth, ‘But for that which is the Law it would be very good hunting.’

The quick-spread ears of the deer caught the last sentence, and a frightened whisper ran along the ranks. ‘The Truce! Remember the Truce!’

‘Peace there, peace!’ gurgled Hathi, the wild elephant. ‘The Truce holds, Bagheera. This is no time to talk of hunting.’

‘Who should know better than I?’ Bagheera answered, rolling his yellow eyes up-stream. ‘I am an eater of turtles—a fisher of frogs. Ngaayah ! Would I could get good from chewing branches!’

‘We wish so, very greatly,’ bleated a young fawn, who had only been born that spring, and did not at all like it. Wretched as the Jungle People were, even Hathi could not help chuckling; while Mowgli, lying on his elbows in the warm water, laughed aloud, and beat up the scum with his feet.

‘Well spoken, little bud-horn,’ Bagheera purred. ‘When the Truce ends that shall be remembered in thy favour,’ and he looked keenly through the darkness to make sure of recognising the fawn again.

Gradually the talking spread up and down the drinking-places. One could hear the scuffling, snorting pig asking for more room; the buffaloes grunting among themselves as they lurched out across the sand-bars, and the deer telling pitiful stories of their long foot-sore wanderings in quest of food. Now and again they asked some question of the Eaters of Flesh across the river, but all the news was bad, and the roaring hot wind of the jungle came and went between the rocks and the rattling branches, and scattered twigs and dust on the water.

‘The men-folk, too, they die beside their ploughs,’ said a young sambhur. ‘I passed three between sunset and night. They lay still, and their Bullocks with them. We also shall lie still in a little.’

‘The river has fallen since last night,’ said Baloo. ‘O Hathi, hast thou ever seen the like of this drought?’

‘It will pass, it will pass,’ said Hathi, squirting water along his back and sides.

‘We have one here that cannot endure long,’ said Baloo; and he looked toward the boy he loved.

‘I?’ said Mowgli indignantly, sitting up in the water. ‘I have no long fur to cover my bones, but—but if thy hide were taken off, Baloo——’

Hathi shook all over at the idea, and Baloo said severely:

‘Man-cub, that is not seemly to tell a Teacher of the Law. Never have I been seen without my hide.’

‘Nay, I meant no harm, Baloo; but only that thou art, as it were, like the cocoanut in the husk, and I am the same cocoanut all naked. Now that brown husk of thine——’Mowgli was sitting cross-legged, and explaining things with his forefinger in his usual way, when Bagheera put out a paddy paw and pulled him over backward into the water.

‘Worse and worse,’ said the Black Panther, as the boy rose spluttering. ‘First Baloo is to be skinned, and now he is a cocoanut. Be careful that he does not do what the ripe cocoanuts do.’

‘And what is that?’ said Mowgli, off his guard for the minute, though that is one of the oldest catches in the Jungle.

‘Break thy head,’ said Bagheera quietly, pulling him under again.

‘It is not good to make a jest of thy teacher,’ said the bear, when Mowgli had been ducked for the third time.

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‘Not good! What would ye have? That naked thing running to and fro makes a monkey-jest of those who have once been good hunters, and pulls the best of us by the whiskers for sport.’ This was Shere Khan, the Lame Tiger, limping down to the water. He waited a little to enjoy the sensation he made among the deer on the opposite bank; then he dropped his square, frilled head and began to lap, growling: ‘The jungle has become a whelping-ground for naked cubs now. Look at me, Man-cub!’

Mowgli looked—stared, rather—as insolently as he knew how, and in a minute Shere Khan turned away uneasily. ‘Mancub this, and Mancub that,’ he rumbled, going on with his drink, ‘the cub is neither man nor cub, or he would have been afraid. Next season I shall have to beg his leave for a drink. Augrh!’

‘That may come, too,’ said Bagheera, looking him steadily between the eyes. ‘That may come, too—Faugh, Shere Khan!—what new shame hast thou brought here?’

The Lame Tiger had dipped his chin and jowl in the water, and dark, oily streaks were floating from it down-stream.

‘Man!’ said Shere Khan coolly, ‘I killed an hour since.’ He went on purring and growling to himself.

The line of beasts shook and wavered to and fro, and a whisper went up that grew to a cry: ‘Man! Man! He has killed Man!’ Then all looked towards Hathi, the wild elephant, but he seemed not to hear. Hathi never does anything till the time comes, and that is one of the reasons why he lives so long.

‘At such a season as this to kill Man! Was no other game afoot?’ said Bagheera scornfully, drawing himself out of the tainted water, and shaking each paw, cat-fashion, as he did so.

‘I killed for choice—not for food.’ The horrified whisper began again, and Hathi’s watchful little white eye cocked itself in Shere Khan’s direction. ‘For choice,’ Shere Khan drawled. ‘Now come I to drink and make me clean again. Is there any to forbid?’

Bagheera’s back began to curve like a bamboo in a high wind, but Hathi lifted up his trunk and spoke quietly.

‘Thy kill was from choice?’ he asked; and when Hathi asks a question it is best to answer.

‘Even so. It was my right and my Night. Thou knowest, O Hathi.’ Shere Khan spoke almost courteously.

‘Yes, I know,’ Hathi answered; and, after a little silence, ‘Hast thou drunk thy fill?’

‘For to-night, yes.’

‘Go, then. The river is to drink, and not to defile. None but the Lame Tiger would so have boasted of his right at this season when—when we suffer together—Man and Jungle People alike. Clean or unclean, get to thy lair, Shere Khan!’

The last words rang out like silver trumpets, and Hathi’s three sons rolled forward half a pace, though there was no need. Shere Khan slunk away, not daring to growl, for he knew—what every one else knows—that when the last comes to the last, Hathi is the Master of the Jungle.

‘What is this right Shere Khan speaks of?’ Mowgli whispered in Bagheera’s ear. ‘To kill Man is always shameful. The Law says so. And yet Hathi says——’

‘Ask him. I do not know, Little Brother. Right or no right, if Hathi had not spoken I would have taught that lame butcher his lesson. To come to the Peace Rock fresh from a kill of Man—and to boast of it—is a jackal’s trick. Besides, he tainted the good water.’

Mowgli waited for a minute to pick up his courage, because no one cared to address Hathi directly, and then he cried: ‘What is Shere Khan’s right, O Hathi?’ Both banks echoed his words, for all the People of the Jungle are intensely curious, and they had just seen something that none, except Baloo, who looked very thoughtful, seemed to understand.

‘It is an old tale,’ said Hathi; ‘a tale older than the Jungle. Keep silence along the banks, and I will tell that tale.’

There was a minute or two of pushing and shouldering among the pigs and the buffalo, and then the leaders of the herds grunted, one after another, ‘We wait,’ and Hathi strode forward till he was nearly knee-deep in the pool by the Peace Rock. Lean and wrinkled and yellow-tusked though he was, he looked what the Jungle knew him to be—their master.

‘Ye know, children,’ he began, ‘that of all things ye most fear Man’; and there was a mutter of agreement.

‘This tale touches thee, Little Brother,’ said Bagheera to Mowgli.

‘I? I am of the Pack—a hunter of the Free People,’ Mowgli answered. ‘What have I to do with Man?’

‘And ye do not know why ye fear Man?’ Hathi went on. ‘This is the reason. In the beginning of the Jungle, and none know when that was, we of the Jungle walked together, having no fear of one another. In those days there was no drought, and leaves and flowers and fruit grew on the same tree, and we ate nothing at all except leaves and flowers and grass and fruit and bark.’

‘I am glad I was not born in those days,’ said Bagheera. ‘Bark is only good to sharpen claws.’

‘And the Lord of the Jungle was Tha, the First of the Elephants. He drew the Jungle out of deep waters with his trunk; and where he made furrows in the ground with his tusks, there the rivers ran; and where he struck with his foot, there rose ponds of good water; and when he blew through his trunk,—thus,—the trees fell. That was the manner in which the Jungle was made by Tha; and so the tale was told to me.’

‘It has not lost fat in the telling,’ Bagheera whispered, and Mowgli laughed behind his hand.

‘In those days there was no corn or melons or pepper or sugar-cane, nor were there any little huts such as ye have all seen; and the Jungle People knew nothing of Man, but lived in the Jungle together, making one people. But presently they began to dispute over their food, though there was grazing enough for all. They were lazy. Each wished to eat where he lay, as sometimes we can do now when the spring rains are good. Tha, the First of the Elephants, was busy making new jungles and leading the rivers in their beds. He could not walk in all places; therefore he made the First of the Tigers the master and the judge of the Jungle, to whom the Jungle People should bring their disputes. In those days the First of the Tigers ate fruit and grass with the others. He was as large as I am, and he was very beautiful, in colour all over like the blossom of the yellow creeper. There was never stripe nor bar upon his hide in those good days when this the Jungle was new. All the Jungle People came before him without fear, and his word was the Law of all the Jungle. We were then, remember ye, one people.

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‘Yet upon a night there was a dispute between two bucks—a grazing-quarrel such as ye now settle with the horns and the fore-feet—and it is said that as the two spoke together before the First of the Tigers lying among the flowers, a buck pushed him with his horns, and the First of the Tigers forgot that he was the master and judge of the Jungle, and, leaping upon that buck, broke his neck.

‘Till that night never one of us had died, and the First of the Tigers, seeing what he had done, and being made foolish by the scent of the blood, ran away into the marshes of the North, and we of the Jungle, left without a judge, fell to fighting among ourselves; and Tha heard the noise of it and came back. Then some of us said this and some of us said that, but he saw the dead buck among the flowers, and asked who had killed, and we of the Jungle would not tell because the smell of the blood made us foolish. We ran to and fro in circles, capering and crying out and shaking our heads. Then Tha gave an order to the trees that hang low, and to the trailing creepers of the Jungle, that they should mark the killer of the buck so that he should know him again, and he said, “Who will now be master of the Jungle People?” Then up leaped the Gray Ape who lives in the branches, and said, “I will now be master of the Jungle.” At this Tha laughed, and said, “So be it,” and went away very angry.

‘Children, ye know the Gray Ape. He was then as he is now. At the first he made a wise face for himself, but in a little while he began to scratch and to leap up and down, and when Tha came back he found the Gray Ape hanging, head down, from a bough, mocking those who stood below; and they mocked him again. And so there was no Law in the jungle—only foolish talk and senseless words.

‘Then Tha called us all together and said “The first of your masters has brought Death into the jungle, and the second Shame. Now it is time there was a Law, and a Law that ye must not break. Now ye shall know Fear, and when ye have found him ye shall know that he is your master, and the rest shall follow.” Then we of the jungle said, “What is Fear?” And Tha said, “Seek till ye find.” So we went up and down the Jungle seeking for Fear, and presently the buffaloes——’

‘Ugh!’ said Mysa, the leader of the buffaloes, from their sand-bank.

‘Yes, Mysa, it was the buffaloes. They came back with the news that in a cave in the Jungle sat Fear, and that he had no hair, and went upon his hind legs. Then we of the Jungle followed the herd till we came to that cave, and Fear stood at the mouth of it, and he was, as the buffaloes had said, hairless, and he walked upon his hinder legs. When he saw us he cried out, and his voice filled us with the fear that we have now of that voice when we hear it, and we ran away, tramping upon and tearing each other because we were afraid. That night, so it was told to me, we of the Jungle did not lie down together as used to be our custom, but each tribe drew off by itself—the pig with the pig, the deer with the deer; horn to horn, hoof to hoof,—like keeping to like, and so lay shaking in the Jungle.

‘Only the First of the Tigers was not with us, for he was still hidden in the marshes of the North, and when word was brought to him of the Thing we had seen in the cave, he said: “I will go to this Thing and break his neck.” So he ran all the night till he came to the cave; but the trees and the creepers on his path, remembering the order that Tha had given, let down their branches and marked him as he ran, drawing their fingers across his back, his flank, his forehead, and his jowl. Wherever they touched him there was a mark and a stripe upon his yellow hide. And those stripes do his children wear to this day! When he came to the cave, Fear, the Hairless One, put out his hand and called him “The Striped One that comes by night,” and the First of the Tigers was afraid of the Hairless One, and ran back to the swamps howling.’

Mowgli chuckled quietly here, his chin in the water.

‘So loud did he howl that Tha heard him and said, “What is the sorrow?” And the First of the Tigers, lifting up his muzzle to the new-made sky, which is now so old, said: “Give me back my power, O Tha. I am made ashamed before all the Jungle, and I have run away from a Hairless One, and he has called me a shameful name.” “And why?” said Tha. “Because I am smeared with the mud of the marshes,” said the First of the Tigers. “Swim, then, and roll on the wet grass, and if it be mud it will wash away,” said Tha; and the First of the Tigers swam, and rolled and rolled upon the grass, till the Jungle ran round and round before his eyes, but not one little bar upon all his hide was changed, and Tha, watching him, laughed. Then the First of the Tigers said, “What have I done that this comes to me?” Tha said, “Thou hast killed the buck, and thou hast let Death loose in the Jungle, and with Death has come Fear, so that the people of the Jungle are afraid one of the other, as thou art afraid of the Hairless One.” The First of the Tigers said, “They will never fear me, for I knew them since the beginning.” Tha said, “Go and see.” And the First of the Tigers ran to and fro, calling aloud to the deer and the pig and the sambhur and the porcupine and all the Jungle Peoples, and they all ran away from him who had been their judge, because they were afraid.

‘Then the First of the Tigers came back, and his pride was broken in him, and, beating his head upon the ground, he tore up the earth with all his feet and said: “Remember that I was once the Master of the Jungle. Do not forget me, O Tha! Let my children remember that I was once without shame, or fear!” And Tha said: “This much I will do, because thou and I together saw the Jungle made. For one night in each year it shall be as it was before the buck was killed—for thee and for thy children. In that one night, if ye meet the Hairless One—and his name is Man—ye shall not be afraid of him, but he shall be afraid of you, as though ye were judges of the Jungle and masters of all things. Show him mercy in that night of his fear, for thou hast known what Fear is.”

‘Then the First of the Tigers answered, “I am content”; but when next he drank he saw the black stripes upon his flank and his side, and he remembered the name that the Hairless One had given him, and he was angry. For a year he lived in the marshes waiting till Tha should keep his promise. And upon a night when the Jackal of the Moon [the Evening Star] stood clear of the Jungle, he felt that his Night was upon him, and he went to that cave to meet the Hairless One. Then it happened as Tha promised, for the Hairless One fell down before him and lay along the ground, and the First of the Tigers struck him and broke his back, for he thought that there was but one such Thing in the jungle, and that he had killed Fear. Then, nosing above the kill, he heard Tha coming down from the woods of the North, and presently the voice of the First of the Elephants, which is the voice that we hear now——’

The thunder was rolling up and down the dry, scarred hills, but it brought no rain—only heat lightning that flickered along the ridges—and Hathi went on: ‘That was the voice he heard, and it said: “Is this thy mercy?” The First of the Tigers licked his lips and said: “What matter? I have killed Fear.” And Tha said “O blind and foolish! Thou hast untied the feet of Death, and he will follow thy trail till thou diest. Thou hast taught Man to kill!”

‘The First of the Tigers, standing stiffly to his kill, said: “He is as the buck was. There is no Fear. Now I will judge the Jungle Peoples once more.”

‘And Tha said: “Never again shall the Jungle Peoples come to thee. They shall never cross thy trail, nor sleep near thee, nor follow after thee, nor browse by thy lair. Only Fear shall follow thee, and with a blow that thou canst not see he shall bid thee wait his pleasure. He shall make the ground to open under thy feet, and the creeper to twist about thy neck, and the tree-trunks to grow together about thee higher than thou canst leap, and at the last he shall take thy hide to wrap his cubs when they are cold. Thou hast shown him no mercy, and none will he show thee.”

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‘The First of the Tigers was very bold, for his Night was still on him, and he said: “The Promise of Tha is the Promise of Tha. He will not take away my Night?” And Tha said: “The one Night is thine, as I have said, but there is a price to pay. Thou hast taught Man to kill, and he is no slow learner.”

‘The First of the Tigers said: “He is here under my foot, and his back is broken. Let the Jungle know I have killed Fear.”

‘Then Tha laughed, and said: “Thou hast killed one of many, but thou thyself shalt tell the jungle—for thy Night is ended.”

‘So the day came; and from the mouth of the cave went out another Hairless One, and he saw the kill in the path, and the First of the Tigers above it; and he took a pointed stick——’

‘They throw a thing that cuts now,’ said Ikki, rustling down the bank; for Ikki was considered uncommonly good eating by the Gonds—they called him Ho-Igoo—and he knew something of the wicked little Gondee axe that whirls across a clearing like a dragon-fly.

‘It was a pointed stick, such as they put in the foot of a pit-trap,’ said Hathi, ‘and throwing it, he struck the First of the Tigers deep in the flank. Thus it happened as Tha said, for the First of the Tigers ran howling up and down the jungle till he tore out the stick, and all the jungle knew that the Hairless One could strike from far off, and they feared more than before. So it came about that the First of the Tigers taught the Hairless One to kill—and ye know what harm that has since done to all our peoples—through the noose, and the pitfall, and the hidden trap, and the flying stick, and the stinging fly that comes out of white smoke [Hathi meant the rifle], and the Red Flower that drives us into the open. Yet for one night in the year the Hairless One fears the Tiger, as Tha promised, and never has the Tiger given him cause to be less afraid. Where he finds him, there he kills him, remembering how the First of the Tigers was made ashamed. For the rest, Fear walks up and down the jungle by day and by night.’

‘Ahi! Aoo!’ said the deer, thinking of what it all meant to them.

‘And only when there is one great Fear over all, as there is now, can we of the jungle lay aside our little fears, and meet together in one place as we do now.’

‘For one night only does Man fear the Tiger?’ said Mowgli.

‘For one night only,’ said Hathi.

‘But I—but we—but all the jungle knows that Shere Khan kills Man twice and thrice in a moon.’

‘Even so. Then he springs from behind and turns his head aside as he strikes, for he is full of fear. If Man looked at him he would run. But on his one Night he goes openly down to the village. He walks between the houses and thrusts his head into the doorway, and the men fall on their faces, and there he does his kill. One kill in that Night.’

‘Oh!’ said Mowgli to himself, rolling over in the water. ‘Now I see why it was Shere Khan bade me look at him! He got no good of it, for he could not hold his eyes steady, and—and I certainly did not fall down at his feet. But then I am not a man, being of the Free People.’

‘Umm!’ said Bagheera deep in his furry throat. ‘Does the Tiger know his Night?’

‘Never till the jackal of the Moon stands clear of the evening mist. Sometimes it falls in the dry summer and sometimes in the wet rains—this one Night of the Tiger. But for the First of the Tigers, this would never have been, nor would any of us have known fear.’

The deer grunted sorrowfully, and Bagheera’s lips curled in a wicked smile. ‘Do men know this—tale?’ said he.

‘None know it except the tigers, and we, the elephants—the children of Tha. Now ye by the pools have heard it, and I have spoken.’

Hathi dipped his trunk into the water as a sign that he did not wish to talk.

‘But—but—but,’ said Mowgli, turning to Baloo, ‘why did not the First of the Tigers continue to eat grass and leaves and trees? He did but break the buck’s neck. He did not eat. What led him to the hot meat?’

‘The trees and the creepers marked him, Little Brother, and made him the striped thing that we see. Never again would he eat their fruit; but from that day he revenged himself upon the deer, and the others, the Eaters of Grass,’ said Baloo.

‘Then thou knowest the tale. Heh? Why have I never heard?’

‘Because the jungle is full of such tales. If I made a beginning there would never be an end to them. Let go my ear, Little Brother.’

IN the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel. All the fishes he could find in all the sea he ate with his mouth —so! Till at last there was only one small fish left in all the sea, and he was a small ‘Stute Fish, and he swam a little behind the Whale’s right ear, so as to be out of harm’s way.

Then the Whale stood up on his tail and said,’I’m hungry.’ And the small ‘Stute Fish said in a small ‘Stute voice, ‘Noble and generous Cetacean, have you ever tasted Man?’

‘No,’ said the Whale. ‘What is it like?’

‘Nice’, said the small ‘Stute Fish. ‘Nice but nubbly.’

‘Then fetch me some,’ said the Whale, and he made the sea froth up with his tail.

‘One at a time is enough’, said the ‘Stute Fish. ‘If you swim to latitude Fifty North, longitude Forty West (that is magic), you will find, sitting on a raft, in the middle of the sea, with nothing on but a pair of blue canvas breeches, a pair of suspenders (you must not forget the suspenders, Best Beloved), and a jack-knife, one ship-wrecked Mariner, who, it is only fair to tell you, is a man of infinite-resource-and-sagacity.’

So the Whale swam and swam to latitude Fifty North, longitude Forty West, as fast as he could swim, and on a raft, in the middle of the sea, with nothing to wear except a pair of blue canvas breeches, a pair of suspenders (you must particularly remember the suspenders, Best Beloved), and a jack-knife, he found one single, solitary shipwrecked Mariner, trailing his toes in the water. (He had his mummy’s leave to paddle, or else he would never have done it, because he was a man of infinite-resource-and-sagacity.)

Then the Whale opened his mouth back and back and back till it nearly touched his tail, and he swallowed the shipwrecked Mariner, and the raft he was sitting on, and his blue canvas breeches, and the suspenders (which you must not forget), and the jack-knife—He swallowed them all down into his warm, dark, inside cup-boards, and then he smacked his lips—so, and turned round three times on his tail.

But as soon as the Mariner, who was a man of infinite-resource-and-sagacity, found himself truly inside the Whale’s warm, dark, inside cup-boards, he stumped and he jumped and he thumped and he bumped, and he pranced and he danced, and he banged and he clanged, and he hit and he bit, and he leaped and he creeped, and he prowled and he howled, and he hopped and he dropped, and he cried and he sighed, and he crawled and he bawled, and he stepped and he lepped, and he danced hornpipes where he shouldn’t, and the Whale felt most unhappy indeed. (Have you forgotten the suspenders?)

So he said to the ‘Stute Fish, ‘This man is very nubbly, and besides he is making me hiccough. What shall I do?’

‘Tell him to come out,’ said the ‘Stute Fish.

So the Whale called down his own throat to the shipwrecked Mariner, ‘Come out and behave yourself. I’ve got the hiccoughs.’

‘Nay, nay!’ said the Mariner. ‘Not so, but far otherwise. Take me to my natal-shore and the white-cliffs-of-Albion, and I’ll think about it.’ And he began to dance more than ever.

‘You had better take him home,’ said the ‘Stute Fish to the Whale. ‘I ought to have warned you that he is a man of infinite-resource-and-sagacity.’

So the Whale swam and swam and swam, with both flippers and his tail, as hard as he could for the hiccoughs; and at last he saw the Mariner’s natal-shore and the white-cliffs-of-Albion, and he rushed half-way up the beach, and opened his mouth wide and wide and wide, and said, ‘Change here for Winchester, Ashuelot, Nashua, Keene, and stations on the Fitchburg Road;’ and just as he said ‘Fitch’ the Mariner walked out of his mouth. But while the Whale had been swimming, the Mariner, who was indeed a person of infinite-resource-and-sagacity, had taken his jack-knife and cut up the raft into a little square grating all running criss-cross, and he had tied it firm with his suspenders (now, you know why you were not to forget the suspenders!), and he dragged that grating good and tight into the Whale’s throat, and there it stuck! Then he recited the following Sloka, which, as you have not heard it, I will now proceed to relate⁠—

For the Mariner he was also an Hi-ber-ni-an. And he stepped out on the shingle, and went home to his mother, who had given him leave to trail his toes in the water; and he married and lived happily ever afterward. So did the Whale. But from that day on, the grating in his throat, which he could neither cough up nor swallow down, prevented him eating anything except very, very small fish; and that is the reason why whales nowadays never eat men or boys or little girls.

The small ‘Stute Fish went and hid himself in the mud under the Door-sills of the Equator. He was afraid that the Whale might be angry with him.

The Sailor took the jack-knife home. He was wearing the blue canvas breeches when he walked out on the shingle. The suspenders were left behind, you see, to tie the grating with; and that is the end of that tale.

WHEN the cabin port-holes are dark and green
        Because of the seas outside;
When the ship goes wop (with a wiggle between)
And the steward falls into the soup-tureen,
          And the trunks begin to slide;
When Nursey lies on the floor in a heap,
And Mummy tells you to let her sleep,
And you aren't waked or washed or dressed,
Why, then you will know (if you haven't guessed)
You're 'Fifty North and Forty West!' 

some notes by Lisa Lewis

Here is a PDF version of the story

The black & white illustrations are by Rudyard Kipling himself, the coloured ones were created by Joseph M. Gleeson in 1912.