ugh the sunlight, grumbling something
about beggars and jugglers. It was a four-anna piece, and would feed
them well for days. The lama, seeing the flash of the metal, droned a
blessing.

'Go thy way, Friend of all the World,' piped the old soldier, wheeling
his scrawny mount. 'For once in all my days I have met a true
prophet--who was not in the Army.'

Father and son swung round together: the old man sitting as erect as
the younger.

A Punjabi constable in yellow linen trousers slouched across the road.
He had seen the money pass.

'Halt!' he cried in impressive English. 'Know ye not that there is a
takkus of two annas a head, which is four annas, on those who enter the
Road from this side-road? It is the order of the Sirkar, and the money
is spent for the planting of trees and the beautification of the ways.'

'And the bellies of the police,' said Kim, slipping out of arm's reach.
'Consider for a while, man with a mud head. Think you we came from the
nearest pond like the frog, thy father-in-law? Hast thou ever heard
the name of thy brother?'

'And who was he? Leave the boy alone,' cried a senior constable,
immensely delighted, as he squatted down to smoke his pipe in the
veranda.

'He took a label from a bottle of belaitee-pani [soda-water], and,
affixing it to a bridge, collected taxes for a month from those who
passed, saying that it was the Sirkar's order. Then came an Englishman
and broke his head. Ah, brother, I am a town-crow, not a village-crow!'

The policeman drew back abashed, and Kim hooted at him all down the
road.

'Was there ever such a disciple as I?' he cried merrily to the lama.
'All earth would have picked thy bones within ten mile of Lahore city
if I had not guarded thee.'

'I consider in my own mind whether thou art a spirit, sometimes, or
sometimes an evil imp,' said the lama, smiling slowly.

'I am thy chela.' Kim dropped into step at his side--that
indescribable gait of the long-distance tramp all the world over.

'Now let us walk,' muttered the lama, and to the click of his rosary
they walked in silence mile upon mile. The lama as usual, was deep in
meditation, but Kim's bright eyes were open wide. This broad, smiling
river of life, he considered, was a vast improvement on the cramped and
crowded Lahore streets. There were new people and new sights at every
stride--castes he knew and castes that were altogether out of his
experience.

They met a troop of long