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240 dramatization of stories known by heart. What a company they were! And how they denied their maker, or portrait-painter, when we said Kipling to them! There was the major's wife, fat, brune, and long past forty, wrinkles drawn in lines of pearl powder around her eyes and under her chin. She wore a youthful sailor-hat, a frizzed front, and a Bath bun, and had all the kittenish ways of sweet sixteen. Her most devoted cavalier, in a cloud of attentive subalterns, was a callow blond, young enough to be her grandson; and if there had been no one else in the hotel, we should have had entertainment enough in the kitten-play of this elderly charmer. When not making eyes and simpering at her courtiers, she queened it over the "leftenants'" and captains' wives, and was inclined to snub a commissioner's daughter. She looked us over critically through a lorgnette, just as we had stared at the tigers and chetahs at the Zoo, and put to us those direct British questions that the rural Yankee cannot match. Having disclosed our relationships, our nationality, our past and future itinerary, and explained the other tourists as far as we knew them, we reversed the situation in Li Hung Chang fashion, and interviewed the interviewer. It always touches the sensitive nerve and presses the button of Anglo-Indian loquacity to mention Kipling, and away went the major's lady like a steeplechaser when we said that Lahore only meant Kipling to us. "No one in India reads Kipling," she said impressively. "We do not esteem him at all. He does not tell the truth about anything. Why, he was a