d on Tods, who was adored by every one from the
_dhoby_ to the dog-boy. Even Futteh Khan, the villainous loafer
_khit_ from Mussoorie, shirked risking Tods' displeasure for fear his
co-mates should look down on him.

So Tods had honour in the land from Boileaugunge to Chota Simla, and
ruled justly according to his lights. Of course, he spoke Urdu, but
he had also mastered many queer side-speeches like the _chotee bolee_
of the women, and held grave converse with shopkeepers and
Hill-coolies alike. He was precocious for his age, and his mixing
with natives had taught him some of the more bitter truths of life:
the meanness and the sordidness of it. He used, over his bread and
milk, to deliver solemn and serious aphorisms, translated from the
vernacular into the English, that made his Mamma jump and vow that
Tods _must_ go Home next hot weather. Just when Tods was in the bloom
of his power, the Supreme Legislature were hacking out a Bill for the
Sub-Montane Tracts, a revision of the then Act, smaller than the
Punjab Land Bill, but affecting a few hundred thousand people none
the less. The Legal Member had built, and bolstered, and embroidered,
and amended that Bill till it looked beautiful on paper. Then the
Council began to settle what they called the 'minor details.' As if
any Englishman legislating for natives knows enough to know which are
the minor and which are the major points, from the native point of
view, of any measure! That Bill was a triumph of 'safe-guarding the
interests of the tenant.' One clause provided that land should not be
leased on longer terms than five years at a stretch; because, if the
landlord had a tenant bound down for, say, twenty years, he would
squeeze the very life out of him. The notion was to keep up a stream
of independent cultivators in the Sub-Montane Tracts; and
ethnologically and politically the notion was correct. The only
drawback was that it was altogether wrong. A native's life in India
implies the life of his son. Wherefore, you cannot legislate for one
generation at a time. You must consider the next from the native
point of view. Curiously enough, the native now and then, and in
Northern India more particularly, hates being over-protected against
himself. There was a Naga Village once, where they lived on dead
_and_ buried Commissariat mules.... But that is another story.

For many reasons, to be explained later, the people concerned
objected to the Bill. The Native Member