del wines, cannot be very bad after all.

That night when the tales were all told and the guard, bless them, were
snoring peaceably in the starlight, a man came stealthily into the
enclosure of canvas and woke the Englishman, muttering "Sahib, Sahib,"
in his ear. It was no robber but some poor devil with a petition--a
grimy, welted paper. He was absolutely unintelligible, and stammered
almost to dumbness. He stood by the bed, alternately bowing to the earth
and standing erect, his arms spread aloft, and his whole body working as
he tried to force out some rebellious word in a key that should not wake
the men without. What could the Englishman do? He was no Government
servant, and had no concern with petitions. The man clicked and choked
and gasped in his desperate desire to make the Sahib understand. But it
was no use; and in the end he departed as he had come-bowed, abject, and
unintelligible.

* * * * *

Let every word written against Ganesh be rescinded. It was by his
ordering that the Englishman saw such a dawn on the Burra Talao as he
had never before set eyes on. Every fair morning is a reprint, blurred
perhaps, of the First Day; but this splendour was a thing to be put
aside from all other days and remembered. The stars had no fire in them
and the fish had stopped jumping, when the black water of the lake
paled and grew grey. While he watched it seemed to the Englishman that
voices on the hills were intoning the first verses of Genesis. The grey
light moved on the face of the waters till, with no interval, a
blood-red glare shot up from the horizon and, inky black against the
intense red, a giant crane floated out towards the sun. In the
still-shadowed city the great Palace Drum boomed and throbbed to show
that the gates were open, while the dawn swept up the valley and made
all things clear. The blind man who said, "The blast of a trumpet is
red," spoke only the truth. The breaking of the red dawn is like the
blast of a trumpet.

"What," said the _chowkidar_, picking the ashes of the overnight fire
out of his beard, "what, I say, are five eggs or twelve eggs to such a
Raj as ours? What also are fowls--what are" ... "There was no talk of
fowls. Where is the fowl-man from whom you got the eggs?" "He is here.
No, he is there. I do not know. I am an old man, and I and the Raj
supply everything without price. The fowl-man will be paid by the
State--liberally paid. Let the Sahib be h