divulge the secrets in which
they profess to disbelieve. No wonder that we hate you, and that we
long for the return of the old days, when even princes were glad to ask
favors at our hands. It is seldom that we show our powers now. Those who
aid us, and whose servants we are, are not to be insulted by the powers
they bestow upon us being used for the amusement of men who believe in
nothing.

"The Europeans who first came to India have left records of the strange
things they saw at the courts of the native princes. But such things are
no longer done for the amusement of our white masters. Thus, then, for
years I have worked against you; and just as I saw that our work was
successful, just as all was prepared for the blow that was to sweep the
white men out of India, you saved my daughter; then my work seemed to
come to an end. Would any of my countrymen, armed only with a whip, have
thrown themselves in the way of a tiger to save a woman--a stranger--one
altogether beneath him in rank--one, as it were, dust beneath his feet?
That I should be ready to give my life for yours was a matter of course;
I should have been an ungrateful wretch otherwise. But this was not
enough. At one blow the work I had devoted myself to for years was
brought to nothing. Everything seemed to me new; and as I sat by my
daughter's bedside, when she lay sick with the fever, I had to think it
all out again. Then I saw things in another light. I saw that, though
the white men were masterful and often hard, though they had little
regard for our customs, and viewed our beliefs as superstitious,
and scoffed at the notion of there being powers of which they had no
knowledge, yet that they were a great people. Other conquerors, many
of them, India has had, but none who have made it their first object to
care for the welfare of the people at large. The Feringhees have wrung
nothing from the poor to be spent in pomp and display; they permit no
tyranny or ill doing; under them the poorest peasant tills his fields in
peace.

"I have been obliged to see all this, and I feel now that their
destruction would be a frightful misfortune. We should be ruled by our
native lords; but as soon as the white man was gone the old quarrels
would break out, and the country would be red with blood. I did not see
this before, because I had only looked at it with the eyes of my own
caste; now I see it with the eyes of one whose daughter has been saved
from a tiger by a whit