Page:In Black and White - Kipling (1890).djvu/67



NCE upon a time, some people in India made a new Heaven and a new Earth out of broken tea-cups a missing brooch or two, and a hair-brush. These were hidden under bushes, or stuffed into holes in the hill side, and an entire Civil Service of Subordinate Gods used to find or mend them again; and every one said:—"There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy". Several other things happened also, but the Religion never seemed to get much beyond its first manifestations; though it added an air-line post and orchestral effects, in order to keep abreast of the times and stall off competition.

This Religion was too elastic for ordinary use. It stretched itself and embraced pieces of everything that medicine-men of all ages have manufactured. It approved of and stole from Freemasonry; looted the Latterday Rosicrucians of half their pet words; took any fragments of Egyptian philosophy that it found in the Encyclopædia Britannica; annexed as many of the Vedas as had been translated into French or English, and talked of all the rest; built in the German versions of what is left of the Zend Avesta; encouraged White, Grey and Black Magic, including spiritualism, palmistry, fortune-telliug by cards, hot chestnuts, double-kernelled nuts and tallow droppings: would have adopted Voodoo and Oboe had it known anything about them, and showed itself, in every way, one of the most accommodating arrangements that had ever been invented since the birth of the Sea.

When it was in thorough working order, with all the machinery down to the subscriptions complete, Dana Da came from nowhere, with nothing in his hands, and wrote a chapter in its history which has hitherto been unpublished. He said that his first name was Dana, and his second