No More Learning

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

"They have no stamina, these brats," said the Doctor, as he left Imam
Din's quarters.

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




ON THE STRENGTH OF A LIKENESS.

If your mirror be broken, look into still water; but have a care
that you do not fall in.
--Hindu Proverb.

Next to a requited attachment, one of the most convenient things that a
young man can carry about with him at the beginning of his career, is
an unrequited attachment. It makes him feel important and business-like,
and blase, and cynical; and whenever he has a touch of liver, or suffers
from want of exercise, he can mourn over his lost love, and be very
happy in a tender, twilight fashion.

Hannasyde's affair of the heart had been a Godsend to him. It was four
years old, and the girl had long since given up thinking of it.

She had married and had many cares of her own. In the beginning, she
had told Hannasyde that, "while she could never be anything more than
a sister to him, she would always take the deepest interest in his
welfare.
" This startlingly new and original remark gave Hannasyde
something to think over for two years; and his own vanity filled in
the other twenty-four months. Hannasyde was quite different from Phil
Garron, but, none the less, had several points in common with that far
too lucky man.

He kept his unrequited attachment by him as men keep a well-smoked
pipe--for comfort's sake, and because it had grown dear in the using. It
brought him happily through the Simla season. Hannasyde was not lovely.
There was a crudity in his manners, and a roughness in the way in which
he helped a lady on to her horse, that did not attract the other sex
to him. Even if he had cast about for their favor, which he did not. He
kept his wounded heart all to himself for a while.

Then trouble came to him. All who go to Simla, know the slope from the
Telegraph to the Public Works Office. Hannasyde was loafing up the hill,
one September morning between calling hours, when a 'rickshaw came down
in a hurry, and in the 'rickshaw sat the living, breathing image of the
girl who had made him so happily unhappy.

Hannasyde leaned against the railing and gasped. He wanted to run
downhill after the 'rickshaw, but that was impossible; so he went
forward with most of his blood in his temples. It was impossible, for
many reasons, that the woman in the 'rickshaw could be the girl he had
known. She was, he discovered later, the wife of a man from Dindigul, or
Coimbatore, or some out-of-the-way place, and she had come up to Simla
early in the season for the good of her health.

She was going back to Dindigul, or wherever it was, at the end of the
season; and in all likelihood would never return to Simla again, her
proper Hill-station being Ootacamund.