virtue as Kimball O'Hara, jiggeting down to Umballa behind Hurree
Chunder Mookerjee, whose name on the books of one section of the
Ethnological Survey was R.17.

And if additional spur were needed, the Babu supplied it. After a huge
meal at Kalka, he spoke uninterruptedly. Was Kim going to school?
Then he, an M A of Calcutta University, would explain the advantages of
education. There were marks to be gained by due attention to Latin and
Wordsworth's Excursion (all this was Greek to Kim). French, too was
vital, and the best was to be picked up in Chandernagore a few miles
from Calcutta. Also a man might go far, as he himself had done, by
strict attention to plays called Lear and Julius Caesar, both much in
demand by examiners. Lear was not so full of historical allusions as
Julius Caesar; the book cost four annas, but could be bought
second-hand in Bow Bazar for two. Still more important than
Wordsworth, or the eminent authors, Burke and Hare, was the art and
science of mensuration. A boy who had passed his examination in these
branches--for which, by the way, there were no cram-books--could, by
merely marching over a country with a compass and a level and a
straight eye, carry away a picture of that country which might be sold
for large sums in coined silver. But as it was occasionally
inexpedient to carry about measuring-chains a boy would do well to know
the precise length of his own foot-pace, so that when he was deprived
of what Hurree Chunder called adventitious aids' he might still tread
his distances. To keep count of thousands of paces, Hurree Chunder's
experience had shown him nothing more valuable than a rosary of
eighty-one or a hundred and eight beads, for 'it was divisible and
sub-divisible into many multiples and sub-multiples'. Through the
volleying drifts of English, Kim caught the general trend of the talk,
and it interested him very much. Here was a new craft that a man could
tuck away in his head and by the look of the large wide world unfolding
itself before him, it seemed that the more a man knew the better for
him.

Said the Babu when he had talked for an hour and a half 'I hope some
day to enjoy your offeecial acquaintance. Ad interim, if I may be
pardoned that expression, I shall give you this betel-box, which is
highly valuable article and cost me two rupees only four years ago.' It
was a cheap, heart-shaped brass thing with three compartments for
carrying the eternal betel-nut