one he called his 'ne varietur'
because those words were written below his signature thereon, and
another his 'clearance-certificate'. The third was Kim's
birth-certificate. Those things, he was used to say, in his glorious
opium-hours, would yet make little Kimball a man. On no account was
Kim to part with them, for they belonged to a great piece of
magic--such magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum, in
the big blue-and-white Jadoo-Gher--the Magic House, as we name the
Masonic Lodge. It would, he said, all come right some day, and Kim's
horn would be exalted between pillars--monstrous pillars--of beauty and
strength. The Colonel himself, riding on a horse, at the head of the
finest Regiment in the world, would attend to Kim--little Kim that
should have been better off than his father. Nine hundred first-class
devils, whose God was a Red Bull on a green field, would attend to Kim,
if they had not forgotten O'Hara--poor O'Hara that was gang-foreman on
the Ferozepore line. Then he would weep bitterly in the broken rush
chair on the veranda. So it came about after his death that the woman
sewed parchment, paper, and birth-certificate into a leather
amulet-case which she strung round Kim's neck.

'And some day,' she said, confusedly remembering O'Hara's prophecies,
'there will come for you a great Red Bull on a green field, and the
Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and' dropping into
English--'nine hundred devils.'

'Ah,' said Kim, 'I shall remember. A Red Bull and a Colonel on a horse
will come, but first, my father said, will come the two men making
ready the ground for these matters. That is how my father said they
always did; and it is always so when men work magic.'

If the woman had sent Kim up to the local Jadoo-Gher with those papers,
he would, of course, have been taken over by the Provincial Lodge, and
sent to the Masonic Orphanage in the Hills; but what she had heard of
magic she distrusted. Kim, too, held views of his own. As he reached
the years of indiscretion, he learned to avoid missionaries and white
men of serious aspect who asked who he was, and what he did. For Kim
did nothing with an immense success. True, he knew the wonderful
walled city of Lahore from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch; was
hand in glove with men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al
Raschid dreamed of; and he lived in a life wild as that of the Arabian
Nights, but missionaries and sec