from stories by
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| The Rout of the White Hussars | |
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| A good trooper values his mount exactly as much as he values himself, and believes, or should believe, that the two together are irresistible where women or men, girls or guns, are concerned. | Topic: |
text checked (see note) Jun 2005 | |
| At the Pit’s Mouth | |
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| She was kittenish in her manners, wearing generally an air of soft and fluffy innocence. But she was deadlily learned and evil-instructed; and, now and again, when the mask dropped, men saw this, shuddered and—almost drew back. Men are occasionally particular, and the least particular men are always the most exacting. | Topic: |
text checked (see note) Jun 2005 | |
| A Second-Rate Woman | |
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‘I expect complications.’ ‘Woman of one idea,’ said Mrs. Mallowe shortly; ‘all complications are as old as the hills! I have lived through or near all—all—ALL!’ ‘And yet do not understand that men and women never behave twice alike.’ | |
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‘I always prefer to believe the best of everybody. It saves so much trouble.’ ‘Very good. I prefer to believe the worst. It saves useless expenditure of sympathy.’ | Topic: |
text checked (see note) Jun 2005 | |
| The Man Who Would Be King | |
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| A newspaper office seems to attract every conceivable sort of person, to the prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission ladies arrive, and beg that the Editor will instantly abandon all his duties to describe a Christian prize-giving in a back-slum of a perfectly inaccessible village; Colonels who have been overpassed for command sit down and sketch the outline of a series of ten, twelve, or twenty-four leading articles on Seniority versus Selection; missionaries wish to know why they have not been permitted to escape from their regular vehicles of abuse and swear at a brother-missionary under special patronage of the editorial We; stranded theatrical companies troop up to explain that they cannot pay for their advertisements, but on their return from New Zealand or Tahiti will do so with interest; inventors of patent punkah-pulling machines, carriage couplings and unbreakable swords and axle-trees call with specifications in their pockets and hours at their disposal; tea-companies enter and elaborate their prospectuses with the office pens; secretaries of ball-committees clamour to have the glories of their last dance more fully described; strange ladies rustle in and say: ‘I want a hundred lady’s cards printed at once, please,’ which is manifestly part of an Editor’s duty; and every dissolute ruffian that ever tramped the Grand Trunk Road makes it his business to ask for employment as a proof-reader. And, all the time, the telephone-bell is ringing madly, and Kings are being killed on the Continent, and Empires are saying—‘You’re another,’ and Mister Gladstone is calling down brimstone upon the British Dominions, and the little black copy-boys are whining, ‘kaa-pi chay-ha-yeh’ (copy wanted) like tired bees, and most of the paper is as blank as Modred’s shield. | Topic: |
text checked (see note) Jun 2005 | |
| Without Benefit of Clergy | |
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‘Thou wilt never cease to love me now?—answer, my king.’ ‘Never—never. No.’ ‘Not even though the mem-log—the white women of thy own blood—love thee? And remember, I have watched them driving in the evening; they are very fair.’ ‘I have seen fire-balloons by the hundred. I have seen the moon, and—then I saw no more fire-balloons.’ | Topic: |
text checked (see note) Jun 2005 | |
| Moti Guj — Mutineer | |
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| An elephant who will not work, and is not tied up, is not quite so manageable as an eighty-one ton gun loose in a heavy sea-way. | Topic: |
text checked (see note) Jun 2005 | |
| The Miracle of Purun Bhagat | |
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| He believed that all things were one big Miracle, and when a man knows that much he knows something to go upon. He knew for a certainty that there was nothing great and nothing little in this world; and day and night he strove to think out his way into the heart of things, back to the place whence his soul had come. | Topics: |
text checked (see note) Jun 2005 | |
| ‘Rikki-tikki-tavi’ | |
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It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose family is, ‘Run and find out’; and Rikki-tikki was a true mongoose. | Topic: |
text checked (see note) Jun 2005 | |
Graphics copyright © 2005 by Hal Keen