the

But rats live in record-rooms, and rats cannot recognise and respect those files which are destined to live for ever. One simple Deputy Commissioner thought it would be a reasonable precaution to keep a cat in the record-room. Puss was acquired and passed the nights in the file mausoleum, but she did not grow fat on the rats. Either a too ratty diet did not suit her, or perhaps the excessive exertion of climbing the racks to catch the rats called for fatty as well as ratty food. Anyway, the humane Deputy Commissioner ordered that she should be given a drink of milk every morning. To make sure that the cat and not the office sweeper drank the milk, the sitting of the court opened in future not with prayers but with a food parade of one cat, one sweeper, one saucer of milk, and one dignified and portly office superintendent. It was like the grand parade of office clerks which Government prescribes in malaria seasons in order that one tabloid of five grains of quinine may be placed on each tongue. The cat did not grow much fatter: perhaps the formality of the parade upset her digestion.

But, alas! the Deputy Commissioner had forgotten a

provincial capital the Accountant - General had not forgotten it, and saw in a contingent bill of March, and again in one of April, "Milk for cat, Rs. 2." Heavens! two of the most admired of all Government's rules have been broken. A district officer has increased the district establishment without the sanction of Government, and he has incurred a recurring charge. Another file has been born, and some day pussy will guard her own life-history from the rats. But this is a file which will have a long life of objection and reply, of explanation, of justification, and of Government sanctions before it comes to rest. Does establishment include a cat or only those who can produce or contribute to a file? If the cat is changed every month, would the charge still be a recurring one? Are traps, or poison, or a cat the cheapest weapon against rats! Such are the momentous questions to be threshed out, and the file continues its glorious existence till it produces at last a crop of mature decisions.

66

The Deputy Commissioner went home on leave and left these great questions still unsettled. Perhaps they were never settled. But certainly the Deputy Commissioner was wrong, for in 1919 the rioters burned down the record-room, and all pussy's efforts to save the files were lost.

Chet Ram, Dina Nath, and a dozen other Hindu shopkeepers of Raipur, a large village, mainly Mahomedan, on a main road and railway, present a petition to the District Magistrate that the Mahomedans of the village are slaughtering cows for food in their houses, and outraging the religious feelings of the poor Hindus. Never before, say they, have cattle been slaughtered in sacred Raipur. The faces of some are smug with satisfaction at being the first in with their petition; others ooze out excitement at once more downing the hated Mahomedans with an anti-cowkilling campaign. Ten minutes later an even greater crowd of Mahomedans-butchers, landowners, and headmen-appear with the inevitable cross-petition complaining that as little Khuda Bakhsh (Theodore, as we should say) was carrying home the evening dinner of beefsteak he was set upon by Sita Ram, who abused him and beat him till he was unconscious. (In the India of petitions no one is ever beaten without becoming unconscious.) What are poor Mahomedans to do in these days when beef alone is cheap and they have lived on beef and slaughtered cows for many generations?

Both parties are told that the cases will be decided that day week on the spot. But the week has not passed when the chief headman comes to the District Magistrate and

tells him that unless special police are sent out at once there will be a riot between Hindus and Mahomedans. So off go the District Magistrate and the Superintendent of Police each in his motor to the village. As the police have not yet been supplied with motor-lorries or any form of transport which is likely to enable them to reach riots before everything is over, they have to rattle out in antediluvian "palki” carriages-square boxes broken springs dragged by pairs of angular broken-kneed ponies, which may travel six miles an hour under a constant lash, and may at any time leave the carriages behind owing to the snapping of the string repairs to the harness. Four men inside, four on the top of the roof, and another on the box

contrary to all police regulations, but what care the police ?

they form a pantomime procession. The generals arrive long before their army; even two Englishmen enough to stop any idea of rioting if ever there was one,

are

The District Magistrate has both parties up before him, and, having ascertained that cow-killing has long been customary in Raipur, orders, under a Punjab law, that the Mahomedans shall no longer slaughter in their houses, which may offend Hindus living near by, but may build a slaughterhouse outside the village, and surround it with a wall high

THE war had perished beyond all hope of revival; the Genius of Famine could almost be heard stalking along the corridors of our Ministries of Coordination, Information, and Demonstration. The long howling of wolves approaching the patent swing-doors had begun to chill the young blood of the brave and the fair, upon whom war had called to warm both their hands for so long at the fire of life on those convenient premises; into the ruder lakedwellings still to be traced by the traveller crossing St James's Park a sense of the horrors of war, its worst, its post-war ones,

was making its way. Thus may poor Pharaoh have felt in his dream when the seven lean and ill-favoured kine, "such as I never saw in all the land of Egypt for badness," came up after the seven fat kine and ate them without bulging.

being just then his strategic base and the seat of his government over circumstance. He had also, somewhat regally, popped his letter into the King's Messenger's bag, distrusting the speed of the common post of our armies.

From his War Office he wrote, "I sit within this frowning pile, and I frown worse than it." Then I knew his spirits were high. He went on, "Let me have war, say I,' as my friend Shakspeare says: 'It's sprightly, waking, audible, and full of vent.'" Then I felt pretty sure that he was as glad the whistle had blown as any old infantry colonel who wanted no more of his men to be chipped. He went on to mention a dear friend of ours, Claude Barbason. Being a Regular, Claude would have to collapse after the war"like other sausage balloons,' Colin vulgarly wrote-from the size of a Brigadier-General to that of a mere common Captain. "Still," Colin wrote,

my mind is easy about him. As long as there's any sort of Q side up above, as our friend the Bard says, that providently caters for the sparrow,' Claude's rations are safe."

"What says the downy old Swan of Avon about it?" followed by some queer quotation. Strange! Saul had come off as one of the saints. But Colin one of the pedants! No! He must have got a new game on. He must be writing like this, playing the ripe Shakspearean, to make me prick up my ears, before he let on. That would be quite in his line. He had fished in his time; he knew how to use ground bait.

Yes, it was a game-a beginning, as Colin said when I came home in May, of the reconstruction of Europe. It all came of a tip that had come indirectly to Colin from one who could not be wrong if the British Constitution is right. Colin's father, the old ambassador, had been there when King Edward met, at a dinner, the greatest of all the Shakspearean pundits. "Stick to Shakspeare, Mr Bowles," the prudent sovereign had said to the freely perspiring student; "there's money in him." Colin had, as Columbia says, figured on this. All sorts and conditions of men, he reflected, were would-be consumers of Shakspeare. All tried to quote him. Teacher and preacher and politician and trader-all of them wedged in a bit of his stuff, if they could, among their own drivel. Rightly seen, the plays were a quarry-only better; all the stone was ready cut. They were what the Colosseum had been when any jerry-builder in Rome could still go in and

VOL. CCXI.-NO. MCCLXXVIII.

steal a load of Titus' or Domitian's building material. But organisation was needed-the "big business "big business" touch. No Geddes or Selfridge had come in as yet to lead the parched horse of Demand to the abounding waters of Supply and make him drink there at a reasonable tariff. A few poor shabby old tags-" The play's the thing," "Put money in thy purse," "To thine own self be true," and so on-were about all that the private consumer could put his hand on. Why, it was as if we were still only scraping a few shaley scuttles of coal, with a shovel, off the surface of Northumberland. Colin figured hard. Then he acted.

You will recall how in that summer of 1919 the fruits of what looked like a richer national culture began to load and bless our advertisement hoardings. Foker's Prime London Ales were, for the first time, recommended to us on those engaging "three-column blocks" of Autolycus singing "A quart of ale is a dish for a king." In extenuation of that mortal sin against the honour of the vine, the Golden Tagus New Australian Port, the preference of Mr Justice Silence for "A cup of wine that's brisk and fine" was cited, with ingenious effrontery, a few weeks later. "Let me have men about me that are fat" (Froud's Fast Filling Breakfast Food), and "Not china dishes, but very good dishes " (Wild's War Saving Dinner Stoneware) were

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