ey do not suffer any rivals. All castes and kinds of
men move here.

'Look! Brahmins and chumars, bankers and tinkers, barbers and bunnias,
pilgrims and potters--all the world going and coming. It is to me as a
river from which I am withdrawn like a log after a flood.'

And truly the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs
straight, bearing without crowding India's traffic for fifteen hundred
miles--such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world. They
looked at the green-arched, shade-flecked length of it, the white
breadth speckled with slow-pacing folk; and the two-roomed
police-station opposite.

'Who bears arms against the law?' a constable called out laughingly,
as he caught sight of the soldier's sword. 'Are not the police enough
to destroy evil-doers?'

'It was because of the police I bought it,' was the answer. 'Does all
go well in Hind?'

'Rissaldar Sahib, all goes well.'

'I am like an old tortoise, look you, who puts his head out from the
bank and draws it in again. Ay, this is the Road of Hindustan. All men
come by this way...'

'Son of a swine, is the soft part of the road meant for thee to scratch
thy back upon? Father of all the daughters of shame and husband of ten
thousand virtueless ones, thy mother was devoted to a devil, being led
thereto by her mother. Thy aunts have never had a nose for seven
generations! Thy sister--What Owl's folly told thee to draw thy carts
across the road? A broken wheel? Then take a broken head and put the
two together at leisure!'

The voice and a venomous whip-cracking came out of a pillar of dust
fifty yards away, where a cart had broken down. A thin, high Kathiawar
mare, with eyes and nostrils aflame, rocketed out of the jam, snorting
and wincing as her rider bent her across the road in chase of a
shouting man. He was tall and grey-bearded, sitting the almost mad
beast as a piece of her, and scientifically lashing his victim between
plunges.

The old man's face lit with pride. 'My child!' said he briefly, and
strove to rein the pony's neck to a fitting arch.

'Am I to be beaten before the police?' cried the carter. 'Justice! I
will have Justice--'

'Am I to be blocked by a shouting ape who upsets ten thousand sacks
under a young horse's nose? That is the way to ruin a mare.'

'He speaks truth. He speaks truth. But she follows her man close,'
said the old man. The carter ran under the wheels of his cart and
then