| CHAPTER I |
| CHAPTER II |
| CHAPTER III |
| CHAPTER IV |
| CHAPTER V |
| CHAPTER VI |
| CHAPTER VII |
| CHAPTER VIII |
| CHAPTER IX |
| CHAPTER X |
| CHAPTER XI |
| CHAPTER XII |
| CHAPTER XIII |
| CHAPTER XIV |
| CHAPTER XV |
O ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,
Be gentle when “the heathen” pray
To Buddha at Kamakura!
He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on herbrick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as thenatives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that “fire-breathingdragon”, hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is alwaysfirst of the conqueror’s loot.
There was some justification for Kim—he had kicked Lala Dinanath’sboy off the trunnions—since the English held the Punjab and Kim wasEnglish. Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke thevernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertainsing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boysof the bazar; Kim was white—a poor white of the very poorest. Thehalf-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and pretended to keepa second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait) told themissionaries that she was Kim’s mother’s sister; but his mother hadbeen nursemaid in a Colonel’s family and had married KimballO’Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment. Heafterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi Railway, and his Regimentwent home without him. The wife died of cholera in Ferozepore, and O’Harafell to drink and loafing up and down the line with the keen-eyedthree-year-old baby. Societies and chaplains, anxious for the child, tried tocatch him, but O’Hara drifted away, till he came across the woman whotook opium and learned the taste from her, and died as poor whites die inIndia. His estate at death consisted of three papers—one he called his“ne varietur” because those words were written below hissignature thereon, and another his “clearance-certificate”. Thethird was Kim’s birth-certificate. Those things, he was used to say, inhis glorious opium-hours, would yet make little Kimball a man. On no accountwas Kim to part with them, for they belonged to a great piece ofmagic—such magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum, in thebig blue-and-white Jadoo-Gher—the Magic House, as we name the MasonicLodge. It would, he said, all come right some day, and Kim’s horn wouldbe exalted between pillars—monstrous pillars—of beauty andstrength. The Colonel himself, riding on a horse, at the head of the finestRegiment in the world, would attend to Kim—little Kim that should havebeen better off than hi