sheâs been single so long!â sez I. Was I goinâ to let a three-year-ould 8 preshume to discoorse wid me â my will beinâ set? No! Slane wint anâ asked her. Heâs a good bhoy is Slane. Wan av these days heâll get into the Comâssariat anâ dhrive a buggy wid his â savinâs. So I provided for Ould Pummeloeâs daughter; anâ now you go along anâ dance agin wid her.â
And I did.
I felt a respect for Miss Jhansi McKenna; and I went to her wedding later on.
Perhaps I will tell you about that one of these days. 9
Thrown Away 1
And some are sulky, while some will plunge.
[
So ho! Steady! Stand still, you!
]
Some you must gentle, and some you must lunge. 2
[
There! There! Who wants to kill you?
]
Some â there are losses in every trade â
Will break their hearts ere bitted and made,
Will fight like fiends as the rope cuts hard,
And die dumb-mad in the breaking-yard.
Toolungala Stockyard Chorus
.
To rear a boy under what parents call the âsheltered life systemâ is, if the boy must go into the world and fend for himself, not wise. Unless he be one in a thousand he has certainly to pass through many unnecessary troubles; and may, possibly, come to extreme grief simply from ignorance of the proper proportions of things.
Let a puppy eat the soap in the bath-room or chew a newly-blacked boot. He chews and chuckles until, by and by, he finds out that blacking and Old Brown Windsor make him very sick; so he argues that soap and boots are not wholesome. Any old dog about the house will soon show him the unwisdom of biting big dogsâ ears. Being young, he remembers and goes abroad, at six months, a well-mannered little beast with a chastened appetite. If he had been kept away from boots, and soap, and big dogs till he came to the trinity full-grown and with developed teeth, consider how fearfully sick and thrashed he would be! Apply that notion to the âsheltered lifeâ, and see how it works. It does not sound pretty, but it is the better of two evils.
There was a Boy once who had been brought up under the âsheltered lifeâ theory; and the theory killed him dead. He stayed with his people all his days, from the hour he was born till the hour he went into Sandhurst nearly at the top of the list. He was beautifully taught in all that wins marks by a private tutor, and carried the extra weight of ânever having given his parents an hourâs anxiety in his lifeâ. What he learnt at Sandhurst beyond the regular routine is of no great consequence. He looked about him, and he found soap and blacking, so to speak, very good. He ate a little, and came out of Sandhurst not so high as he wentin. Then there was an interval and a scene with his people, who expected much from him. Next a year of living unspotted from the world in a third-rate depot battalion where all the juniors were children and all the seniors old women; and lastly he came out to India where he was cut off from the support of his parents, and had no one to fall back on in time of trouble except himself.
Now India is a place beyond all others where one must not take things too seriously â the mid-day sun always excepted. Too much work and too much energy kill a man just as effectively as too much assorted vice or too much drink. Flirtation does not matter, because everyone is being transferred and either you or she leave the Station, and never return. Good work does not matter, because a man is judged by his worst output and another man takes all the credit of his best as a rule. Bad work does not matter, because other men do worse and incompetents hang on longer in India than anywhere else. Amusements do not matter, because you must repeat them as soon as you have accomplished them once, and most amusements only mean trying to win another personâs money. Sickness does not matter, because itâs all in the dayâs work, and if you die,
Clara Benson
Melissa Scott
Frederik Pohl
Donsha Hatch
Kathleen Brooks
Lesley Cookman
Therese Fowler
Ed Gorman
Margaret Drabble
Claire C Riley