Plain Tales from the Hills: reference groups

The old man, once he understands, roars with laughter, admits he deserved a thrashing, and offers to talk the title-loving father round.

With the great man's weight behind him, the lover borrows clothes and wins the parents' consent within minutes.

After a proverb, a shiftless young man sails out to a plantation job his uncle found him, vowing to reform, save his salary and come back to marry his tearful sweetheart.

After an epigraph, a clever, charming young officer from an obscure station wants to escape his regiment for a permanent appointment in the hill capital.

He forges the date on an invitation for a clever society woman who has been snubbed; grateful, she asks what she can do, and he asks her to get him a good appointment.

The narrator describes the tenants of an old man's house in the city: a moneylender, a man who claims to cut seals, two courtesans; the old man counts him a friend because his recommendation got a relative a post.

The accountant was foisted on the bank through a politician's favour; now a director wants his own nominee in; the doctor asks the manager if he knows how sick the man is.

The colonel's pious wife is a suspicious gossip who has wrecked a marriage, stopped an engagement and caused a young wife's death.

She weighs which great men she can work on, while a new viceroy's craze for official secrecy grips the government.

After an epigraph, a new viceroy brings a hard, officious private secretary who keeps drawing matters outside his province into his own hands, while the viceroy watches, amused.

The viceroy laughs till he cries; the tale of the secretary's friend with the powder goes round, and at a picnic the viceroy jokes that his secretary hired an assassin, until the secretary takes the hint and resigns with a glowing reference.

He finds himself gazetted on leave, is carried off by camel with the three men for seven weeks, and the wedding day passes with no bridegroom while the bride's family is mocked.

He calls on the most powerful man in government, quotes the secret notes from memory, and remarks that the last appointment went by favour; the man promises to see, then tries to block him.

After eleven days of uproar they give him the appointment to keep him quiet; the viceroy warns it is not done twice, and the woman reflects on what fools men are.

It is hard to get a hearing with the viceroy, unless one is as grand as a pompous senior official of nearly the same name, who has come to confer.

The secretary drops a letter from the name, and the invitation to a private lunch goes to the inventor, who talks of his theory and tips his powder into the ash-tray.

He lights the powder; choking smoke fills the house, guards and ladies panic, and the viceroy, prostrate with laughter, declares it a magnificent success.

He relays a shopkeeper's case: five-year leases mean fresh stamps, fees and courts every few years, while fifteen would give a man and his son peace.

Struck, the legal member makes careful inquiries among the people concerned, amends the tenure clause, and the boy becomes a hero of the bazaar without understanding why.

The narrator explains that the government commits its most sensitive orders to paper and circulates them by hand.

The council is finishing a land bill that limits leases to five years to protect tenants; the narrator says it is correct in theory and wrong in practice.

Nobody consulted the people affected; the conscientious legal member knows only English-speaking notables, and the busy district officers make no representations.

A new colonel tells the regiment it is not smart enough and casts its beloved old drum-horse, which it paid dearly for and which is the soul of the regiment.

The drum-horse is replaced by an ugly beast and put up for public auction; the regiment is near mutiny, and when the troopers offer to buy him the colonel forbids it as mutinous.

The proprietor's nephew now runs the house shabbily with the old man's woman, adulterates the drug, lets the room decay and scrimps on the idol's incense.

He learns the underside of society from the bottom and aches on nights of music he cannot join.

The boy is idolised by the household servants and the bearers, speaks the local languages, talks with shopkeepers and labourers, and repeats their hard sayings at breakfast.

At his mother's dinner the boy, in his dressing-gown, hears the bill named and tells the legal member he knows all about it from his friends in the bazaar.

The accused's friends telegraph for the master of disguise, now married, who comes gladly, spends three weeks disguised about the accuser's house, and finds the case invented from start to finish.

In court he greets the chief witness with a private word that shows he knows all, and the terrified man recants every detail.

He lectures the narrator on his ignorance of the life around him, and they eat together with the woman who loves him and has stayed with him three years.

The narrator's cynical creed: in this country good work goes to others, bad work goes unpunished, and the wise man takes nothing seriously.

After a proverb, the narrator introduces a policeman who studies the country's hidden life, and the one master of disguise he models himself on, who is never rewarded for it.

He solves a great murder case in disguise, but it does him no good because it shows up his seniors' incapacity.

Haunted by fear of dying and leaving his wife unprovided, he works like a horse, but his employers pay by age, not merit, and give him only a boy's rises.

A middle-aged official is said to know more about the princely states than any man alive; his superiors echo his words and feel they are guiding the empire, while he does the work.

He cannot take an order without improving on it, overworks in the heat, frets over rebukes, and ignores the doctor; one evening he mocks a man for giving thanks for rain.

After an epigraph, an engineer left alone four years in an out-district does his work well but takes to secret, solitary drinking that ages him.

Nightly he shows the dying man the books, invents sympathetic letters from the directors, and endures his lectures on his manager's sinful ways after double days of work.

He cannot afford ponies or shared lodgings, lives in one bare room by the office, sleeps on the roof, and people stop asking him out because he seems a miser.

The rival produces maps, tables and surveys, sitting up nights on top of his own work and a special duty elsewhere, too proud to seem ignorant.

New questions draw ever longer answers and a thirty-three-page theory, all carefully filed by the vengeful man, who asks for more.

His superiors keep him working by praise, even the viceroy's, until he believes himself indispensable; yet hardly anyone knows who he is, and his work leaves no time for friends.

He works ten hours a day for two hundred and thirty days, and love makes the book a masterpiece; the narrator notes how women drive men out of the ranks and then lose interest.

Mid-lecture his words turn to gibberish and he is struck dumb as the storm breaks; the doctor diagnoses aphasia from overwork.

His speech returns in two days, but he is cowed, cannot trust his own mind, and goes on three months' leave in fear.

The jockey's nerve is gone for good; he asks for a thrashing and his dismissal, and walks away muttering the dead man's words while others sneer.

He collapses into delirium tremens and for hours whispers out his soul, his worship of her and his shame.

Broken, he resigns; after three days the head of the firm offers him, for his proven ability, a far better post at six hundred and fifty rupees.

After fourteen months of questions on bristles and hides, the weary rival writes a flippant suggestion that his correspondent raise his pigs before tanning them.

The boy takes everything seriously, gambling, women and quarrels, losing money and health, and nobody tells him what everyone else knows.

After an epigraph, the narrator introduces a brilliant young civil servant who has brought out a fashionable godless creed, one tenet of which is that obeying an order is sinful.

He preaches his creed at the club until his seniors throw cushions and nicknames at him; his superior calls him an idiot, though his work would have carried him far.

After an epigraph, a pretty, awkward new subaltern who cannot do any of the things his smart regiment prizes is ragged to knock him into shape.

The directors send him a new accountant: arrogant, narrow, new to the country, and convinced they chose him for his brilliant talents.

The two cannot get on; the accountant despises the manager's friends and way of life, lectures him on how to run the bank, and is often sick, leaving double work.

After a verse epigraph, the narrator argues that a boy raised under a sheltered life meets the world's dangers too late and too hard, like a puppy kept from soap.

The boy, who never gave his parents a moment's worry, slips at his training, disappoints his family, and is sent out alone to his first posting.

After a season of excess a severe rebuke from his commanding officer makes him more wretched, and he privately believes himself ruined beyond redemption.

Weak and extravagant but likeable, he works passably and credits himself for it, while his sweetheart's family objects to the engagement.

Nobody warns him; his commanding officer, who hates married juniors, calls it good training; he runs up debts while his fiancee prepares to come out.

After an epigraph, the narrator tells how a young man, a month before sailing out to his first appointment, married a slightly older girl secretly before the registrar.

The salary that looked large at home goes nowhere; he sends more than half of it to his wife and must still save for her passage while learning strange work.

They marry on condition he drops his old ways for departmental routine that pays and leads upward; he keeps his word, at a cost.

The mother consents only if he earns fifty rupees a month, far beyond his prospects; the lovers swear fidelity and he is transferred to a remote office.

The official's report earns him a transfer on a salary big enough to marry; he could never repeat the deed.

He proposes a matrimonial department, then introduces a quiet, self-contained young official with a brilliant career, praised by all his superiors for knowing when to hold his tongue.

He falls in love with a good, lovely girl from a poor family his world considers socially impossible; the match would weigh on his career for ever, and he will hear no remonstrance.

The marriage is to stay secret for a year until she can come out; he sails, and she waits in a cheap room in London.

His wife's letters grow querulous; he hears that marriage would cost a junior his post; then his baby son dies, and he must show no sign of grief.

He falls in love, but her parents refuse a man from the worst-paid department with strange ways; he takes leave and hires on in disguise as her groom.

He forgets her for weeks at a time; under family pressure she marries an eligible suitor and writes him a stormy letter.

After an epigraph, a pretty girl of modest family is courted by a rich, powerful and extraordinarily ugly senior official, to her mother's delight.

After a ballad epigraph, a young girl's parents make her marry a sickly, well-off officer some thirty-five years older.

She loved a poor man with no prospects; her mother broke the engagement by weeping, and he had himself transferred to the worst station he could find.

Seeing he meant to go with the rival all along, the wife decides her living husband matters more than her grief and prepares a stunning dress in secret.

At the ball she outshines everyone and fills her card; the husband, dazzled, crosses the room to beg her for a dance.

She strikes the rival's dances off his card with a pet name, and at supper he snubs the rival as if the mistake were hers.

The couple go home together; the defeated rival wryly admits that the silliest woman can manage a clever man.

After an epigraph, the narrator introduces a conceited, popular man who means to propose to the prettier of two sisters, and warns against praising a sister to a sister.

The sisters go everywhere together, each wary of the other; he divides his attentions evenly and gives no sign.

They ride back at dawn; the suitor kisses her in front of the whole picnic, who applaud as at a play.

The clever woman decides he will break his engagement to please the other, and fights a seven-week social war to win him away, while people say shameful things about her.

The girl enjoys his attention but prefers a handsome young officer with no prospects; her mother scolds her and reminds her of the precedence she would gain.

The suitor stages an archery contest with a diamond bracelet everyone knows is meant for her, winning it to mean accepting him.

Seeing his smug smile, she nods to her young man and deliberately shoots wide, into the supports and the ground, before the whole assembly.

A plain schoolgirl wins; the suitor must present the prize, the mother weeps in public, and the young officer takes the girl away.

Her faith in her husband is gone and her life spoiled, while the station, told the story by her enemy, laughs at her.

The narrator, the only witness, pays the driver, keeps her name out of it, and gets her away by force.

The senior officer recognises him; he begs him not to tell the mess, then spends the summer trying to have his captors court-martialled while the story spreads through the province.

The second-in-command argues that any action would make the regiment a laughingstock across the army and cannot be proved against any officer; the colonel slowly calms down.

He is openly miserable; his fellow officers make his life a burden; everyone pities him and agrees it is not her fault.

The collector takes it back and calls the suitor a thief; the young woman breaks off the engagement and he leaves; the charm is hidden on a pony's necklace.

The young officer is thrown from his cart onto a woman's lawn and loses the colonel's watch there; the colonel loses the other watch and comes home late with an excuse his wife rejects.

The wife confronts the colonel; he admits the watch is his but denies everything else, and she pours out her jealousy and hatred.

Holding the watch, the wife feels a little of the suspicion she has inflicted on others, but cannot believe her husband against appearances.

Handcuffed after a scuffle, he is told he matches the description of a deserter; the more he explains, the less the stationmaster believes him.

At the next station he is handed to a corporal who calls him a disgrace to the service and tells him to hold his tongue.

The colonel demands an explanation; the man swears he never had a wife; in the mess she tells of their marriage and knows all about his people.

The officers' wives have already convicted him; she names a tattoo on his shoulder, and when a major asks for her certificate she produces a paper for him to read aloud.

He brings a criminal charge against a man who had been attentive to his wife, resting on servants' evidence; two-thirds of the station believe it, and the accused knows even acquittal on doubt will blacken him.

To avoid a scene, the chaplain's wife tells the traveller to promise he will come back and marry her, and he promises all the way up the hill.

She waits and is told he will return; he has sailed home and forgotten her entirely.

When her temper frays, the chaplain's wife admits the promise was a lie to keep her quiet; the girl renounces them and goes back to her own people.

The letters would break his parents' hearts, so the narrator proposes they say he died of cholera with them at his side.

They draft a glowing false account of his death, strip his keepsakes, and cut a lock of the senior officer's hair to send as his.

They rehearse the story all day; the senior officer admits he once came close to the same end; they report the death to the commanding officer.

He tells the doctor she fell from her horse; she never speaks of that night, drifts about expecting someone, and dies at home two years later.

The doctor says the accountant has three months to live; that evening a letter from the directors dismisses him; the manager hides it and plans a merciful fraud.

When the new accountant arrives the manager hides him at the club, pays the sick man's salary from his own pocket, and forges letters from the directors; the strain wears him down.

To keep him interested in life the manager invents a rise in salary; the accountant dies believing he would have done great things for the bank.

The lawn's owner, whom the colonel's wife hates, finds the watch, hears the truth, and sends it to the wife with a pointed note, vowing never to explain.

The young officer wants to tell the truth, but the woman refuses; he lets it drop and moves away, and the couple remain wretched.

The others let him be, but the senior subaltern, soured by waiting for promotion, keeps up a coarse hoax; the newcomer calmly bets him a month's pay he will play a sell on him he will never forget.

The paper is a receipt certifying that the newcomer has paid his debts and won the wager; the woman has fled.

After an epigraph, one young official sells another a vicious horse that nearly kills him; the seller laughs it off, and the buyer vows to get even if it takes five years.

The vengeful man proposes a scheme to feed the army on pig and has the government order his rival to supply information; the rival, flattered, begins with an essay on the primitive pig.

The vengeful man sends the rival's letter and essay to a newspaper that mocks him; shaken and ridiculed, the rival confronts him and gets only mild sympathy.

A subaltern buys the drum-horse at the sale; when the colonel is angry he feigns submission and promises to shoot it; the colonel, who knows he erred but cannot admit it, is soothed; the subaltern and a friend quietly prepare something.

The horse trots up to the mess for bread; the colonel finds it alive, the drums made of paper, and wrenches off the wired skeleton, cursing the band as cowards.

A packet of confidential state papers, badly addressed, is delivered by a careless messenger to the society woman, who tears it open.

She reads the secret papers and sees their value; the young officer arrives, they study them together, and he decides to aim at the intelligence or foreign departments.

A rival owner discovers by chance a spot on one course where a spoken voice echoes from brick mounds by the track, and keeps it to himself.

The collector grumbles at the club about his run of bad luck; the man who knew tells him the charm's story half in jest; the infatuated officer, lunching unseen beyond the arch, hears every word.

The infatuated officer calls while the collector is out and steals the box; three days later the young woman astonishes everyone by accepting him.

A woman's cruel remark tips him over; he goes off alone to shoot, and a senior officer who had tried to check him guesses the truth and recruits the narrator.

Overexcited, the narrator takes charge, tells the suitor to stay and explain himself, and goes to fetch the younger sister.

He chases her across dangerous ground through the tail of the storm while she shouts at him to go away.

Speaking like a mother, she gently takes the conceit out of him and paints a picture of the marriage that would be the making of him.

Argument only fixes him in his purpose; the clever society woman attends a council of three men on his case and proposes a plan.

The man who knew persuades the collector, whose luck has turned, to burgle the suitor's hotel room during a dance; they find the box under his papers.

The mother praises her paragon groom; he must endure being slanged by men he outranks, even one he recruited, and watch others flirt with her.

A distinguished old man flirts offensively with her; the disguised lover seizes his bridle and threatens him, giving himself away.

After an epigraph, a callow rich young officer who prides himself on trusting his own judgment falls under the control of a heartless, businesslike woman.

She and the narrator's clever friend detest each other; the woman breaks the young man in to fetch, wait and pay, and treats him like a servant.

A plain young woman works as a temporary children's nurse for a lady who calls her dirty and inattentive and never considers she has a life of her own.

On the ride out the narrator sees a dust-storm gathering but says nothing to spoil the well-managed party.

She explains she dare not expose the fraud: she is in debt to the moneylender, the trickster's friend, who could poison her; and she had hoped to get the old man's money herself.

The narrator is helpless: he has seemed to abet the fraud, has no witnesses, cannot act without endangering the woman, and fears she will poison the trickster.

At dinner he gives their small son wine until he cries and is removed, then sends his wife from the table while the guests sit angry and helpless.

Unless stolen it turns on its owner within three years; a young official bought it as a curiosity without knowing, and a man who recognised it said nothing.

After a verse epigraph, an orphaned girl from a hill village is raised by the chaplain's wife as half-servant, half-companion, and grows very beautiful.

The policeman spends seven years learning the underworld, its dances, cant and secret societies, and respectable people write him off as odd.

Living comfortably and saving nothing, he drops his correspondents at home one by one and meets a shrewd, handsome young woman.

After a proverb and the narrator's warning to keep to one's own kind, a man who knows too much of the city's hidden life strays into a blind alley below the grated window of a lonely young widow.

His companion scolds him; the narrator learns he is thirty-five though he looks fifty, and has cut himself off from his own people entirely and wants no notice.

He refuses charity, accepts only tobacco and books, and agrees the narrator must visit him only after dark, saying he would have done the same in his days of standing.

The recovering traveller, engaged to a girl at home, laughs at her feelings but enjoys her company and pet names while he convalesces.

He decodes the objects as a summons from the widow for eleven o'clock, and that night goes to the alley disguised in a woman's cloak.

By day he does his office work and pays calls; by night he visits her, delighted by her; he never considers who her guardian is or why he is not discovered and killed.

He sees in a passing rickshaw the living image of his old love, a married woman visiting for the season, and decides to get to know her and pretend for a while.

Her husband is transferred and she stays a week in the young man's station; he realises he has fallen for her, an honest married woman, and curses his folly.

She gently turns aside his remarks and thanks him as one who knows it was all for the likeness; at the station he tells her he hopes never to see her face again, and she understands.

Called to the hill capital to try for a vacant post, the nervous, handsome man cannot judge who is who and makes a goddess of a cold, worthless society woman.

A very young officer adores her too earnestly and demands too much; she checks him sternly, though he reminds her of a lad who loved her twenty-three years before.

A small, disliked, worthless officer is blindly infatuated with a good, tall young woman who looks on him as vermin; the whole station laughs.

He falls suddenly in love with a frivolous, lisping girl; the station laughs; she pretends interest in his work and mocks it behind his back.

She glances at it and says she did not understand it; broken, he returns to hack work and sinks the whole edition in a lake, keeping one copy that he later gives the narrator.

The two race thirty miles to the rest house and find it silent but for a lamp burning in daylight and the sound of flies.

Widowed and rich, his old sweetheart rereads his letter, sets out to offer him her hand and fortune, and finds him little altered and married.

Waiting in the rain for the coach, she finds him in it, dead, tied upright by the driver, and falls screaming into the mud.

The sum would have saved his wife and son; he laughs uncontrollably, says he is an old man now and will retire, and is never seen again.

When typhoid breaks out his wife falls ill; he is too shy to ask for help for eight days, and a neighbour scolds him; the station nurses all its sick through, but she relapses and dies.

The old man asks whether magic is against the law; the narrator jokingly gives it his sanction, learns how much the old man has already paid, and goes to watch.

After an incantation as epigraph, the narrator tells the history of a tiny silver box holding a carved fish, a love-charm that works only if it has been stolen.

The narrator challenges the doubting reader to keep such a box three years, or better, steal it and be sorry.

At a remote rest house the servant runs back in terror, saying he met the dead wife on the road and she sent word she would meet her husband next month at a distant town.

The doctor walks the verandah all night; back at work, he tells an old friend the story, and a telegram arrives ordering him to that very town to fight cholera.

A violent dust-storm plunges the party into roaring darkness, and everyone huddles blindly by the horses.

The seal-cutter comes up, has the lamp put out, and a pale flame rises from a basin as the old man throws himself on the floor.

Stripped and eyes rolled back, the seal-cutter crawls round the basin in utter silence for ten minutes; everyone, the narrator included, is horrified.

The seal-cutter spouts fire from his nostrils, a trick the narrator knows, and he realises the whole business is a fraud.

As the band plays at watering, the dead drum-horse comes down the road at sunset, drums draped in crape and a skeleton riding on its back.

One man yells and wheels; panic spreads troop by troop; the band breaks and the whole regiment stampedes while the colonel and officers are at the mess.

After an epigraph, the narrator describes a marriage strained after a baby's death, and the arrival of a clever, mischievous society woman.

The rival annexes the husband publicly; friends make sure the grieving wife hears; she keeps her own counsel and tells him to go to a ball without her.

She falls ill and loses her looks; her husband mocks her plainness and neglects her; she learns her old love is coming up to the hills gravely ill.

After an epigraph about a husband who has come to hate his wife, the narrator introduces a coarse, grizzled, middle-aged officer and his pale, quiet, much younger wife.

He torments her with years of brutal chaff about her headaches, her looks and her love for her children, and she stays devoted to him.

His devotion is platonic; she treats him as her property; believing in her influence, he fights his secret drinking and keeps relapsing.

The speaker, who once earned three hundred a month on a timber contract, now lives on sixty rupees a month left by an aunt, and the habit has grown on him.

He began trying the drug at home in the city; his wife seems to have died then; he found his way to the house and never left.

Drunk two days a week, he raves in Greek and German, and promises the narrator materials for a new Inferno that will make him famous.

Recovering, he boasts that he can no longer feel shame or even a hangover, and insists such insensibility is enviable.

Scorned by her own people and awkward for her guardians, she refuses to be sent away to work, then carries home an injured stranger and declares she will marry him.

The chaplain and his wife nurse the unconscious man and lecture her on propriety; she calmly repeats that he is the man she will marry.

She marries a man who beats her and fades into old age, while the chaplain's wife blames her nature rather than the lie.

The boy has shot himself; the two go through the letters he wrote to his family, his commanding officer and a girl at home.

They burn the bedding, bury the body themselves, and settle how to time the story so it seems natural.

Everyone forgets the boy within a fortnight; some blame the senior officer for denying a proper funeral; the mother writes a grateful letter.

He writes an eight-page letter of eternal constancy that he half feels for two days; she cries over it and keeps it.

He marries her and settles down; she knows his weaknesses and manages him tenderly.

As the hot weather nears and he still says nothing, both sisters grow strained, one more acid and the other less winning.

He gives a moonlight riding picnic, and the whole small station knows he means to propose there.

The younger sister begs to be taken home; then the suitor grabs the narrator and shouts that he has proposed to the wrong sister.

He insists he loved the younger sister all along; the elder comes up radiant and takes his arm while the younger mounts and rides away.

Her horse goes lame; she begs to be let alone, and he tells her awkwardly that the suitor has something to say to her.

The party rides home in pairs, the narrator escorting the elder sister, and everyone drops back into ordinary life.

Treated kindly instead of used, the young man comes over to her and speaks of his engagement as a piece of boyish folly.

She keeps him under her wing until the wedding and helps with his debts; he takes her advice, leaves the service and goes home to farm.

The suitor entertains lavishly and wields great influence; archery is the fashion, and the girl is the best lady archer in the hills.

After an epigraph, the narrator describes, with the prejudice of his day, a poor community of mixed descent living on the margins of colonial society.

She squabbles with her mother over money; a sickly, proud young telegraph signaller courts her, and his government post makes her mother lenient.

At a forgotten coastal office, with the senior officials long absent, a riot breaks out and spreads through the town.

His colleague flees, the local police ask him for orders, and though terrified he leads them out, fires on the mob and scatters it.

Town elders relay the local magistrate's complaint that he acted unconstitutionally; he faces them down, but breaks into tears when the young official arrives next morning.

After a proverb, a poor young officer and his colonel, dressing in a hurry at the club, each pick up the other's identical cheap watch.

The narrator argues that where every man has someone set over him, a creed denying anyone at the head of affairs cannot survive.

People complain of too much secretary and too little viceroy; meanwhile a cranky inventor with a cholera fumigant arrives, convinced a medical ring is against him.

After an epigraph, the narrator argues that marriages arranged by mature, discreet people are sounder than love matches, since lovers cannot see straight.

The bride's father comes raging and shows his coarseness; the young man keeps quiet, the girl refuses to sue and marries someone else, and he returns to his career and a suitable future match.

After a soldier's anecdote as epigraph, a vain young officer who prides himself on looking like an officer and a gentleman rides down from the hills at the very end of his leave.

Dressed in a new suit and white helmet, he leaves his money at the hotel and sends his servants ahead; a monsoon downpour begins.

He is thrown by a pony, his helmet dissolves into pulp, and the cheap dyes of his clothes run in every colour down his body.

At the railway station, with six annas to his name and no servants, he asks for a ticket; the staff telegraph for authority and then seize him.

His swearing wins the soldiers' admiration, but he tries to run, is knocked down with his shirt torn off, just as one of his own senior officers arrives.

The verse epigraph alone: a step off the well-ordered road leads into an old land where spirits and powers of darkness keep company with travellers.

The sham seal-cutter exploits the old man's fear for his sick son by arranging daily telegrams of the son's health; the old man sends for the narrator.

At the darkened house one of the women whispers that the ritual is a trick to get the old man's money; the narrator hides in a window recess.

A shrivelled head appears in the basin and speaks by ventriloquism, reporting the son's illness and demanding that the fee be doubled.

The woman mutters that it is a fake; the seal-cutter vanishes with his props; the old man wails that he cannot raise more, and the woman calmly calls it a sham.

She says the old man brought the narrator only to be sure he was not breaking the law, and that the trickster has forbidden him to visit his son.

The senior subaltern gets his promotion and an engagement; one night, as he boasts of his fiancee to the mess and the officers' wives, a woman's voice asks for her husband.

A lovely, travel-worn woman throws her arms round him, calling him her darling and begging forgiveness for coming out, while everyone expects the worst.

They find the newcomer unlacing his stays; the mess roars, makes him president of the dramatic club, and nicknames him after the senior subaltern's wife; the narrator calls it dangerous.

The verse epigraph alone: a rider's song that horses and racing come first and women and wine second.

The narrator calls local racing rotten and half sham: everyone knows everyone too well to press a man for his losings when you are fond of his wife.

An ugly, cheap horse wins everything at two miles, provided his jockey sits perfectly still; his owner has taught a nervous boy to do just that.

The champion's jockey was nearly killed in a notorious racing disaster and tells the story, always with a dying rider's last words; the rival knows it by heart.

Stung by the champion owner's boasting, the district sets a handicap to break him; the rival owner enters his mare and lies about her chances.

During the race the rival speaks the dead rider's words at the echo spot; the jockey screams, the horse throws him, and the rival's mare wins him fifteen thousand.

He hears a laugh behind the grating and whispers a verse of a love song; a voice caps it; next day an old woman throws him a packet of objects that form a secret lover's letter.

She sings of being the drudge of her father's house; he answers; she has loosened the grating so he can climb in, and a strange double life begins.

His attentions to a lady of his own circle are gossiped about until the news reaches the widow, who is beaten for neglecting her work, rages, and threatens to kill herself unless he drops the lady.

She insists he go and not return; three weeks later he knocks at the grating and she holds out arms whose hands have been cut off; someone inside stabs at him, wounding him for life.

He never learns what happened or even where the house's front door lies; the grating is walled up, and he goes on paying calls, reckoned a very decent sort of man.

Passed off as jungle fever, the attack is followed by his reform; he credits her influence, drops a friend who laughs at the idea, and later marries a far better woman.

After an epigraph, the narrator introduces a bank manager who is a carefree sportsman from four to ten and a hard, shrewd man of business from ten to four.

The bank's directors trust him as far as directors trust managers; his branch does complex local credit work that needs a man who knows his clients' affairs.

After an epigraph, the narrator introduces a fearless six-year-old boy whom everyone in the hill capital knows, the only child ever to interrupt the supreme council.

Chasing his runaway goat onto the viceroy's lawn, he calls on the council members to help, and they leave their meeting to catch it for him; his mother smacks him.

The boy pauses to put his thoughts in order, translating from the vernacular as the legal member helps with questions.

Seniors praise his thrift and tell him to keep girls out of his heart; then his wife writes that she has gone off with another man.

The seller is an earnest young enthusiast for developing the province's agriculture; the buyer watches him and boasts he will chase him till he drops.

The narrator explains that the government will set whole departments to answering any man who seems earnest, and that earnestness is easily faked.

When a question seems to reopen everything, the rival writes only consult my first letter; the vengeful man complains formally; a new head rebukes the rival, who pleads for leave.

After an epigraph, the narrator says he once saw the proudest cavalry regiment in the country flee in terror, an incident it never wants mentioned.

The troopers give what they think is the drum-horse a grand funeral; the farrier says it is the wrong horse and notices black paint, but is told he is drunk.

In revenge the colonel drives the regiment through a gruelling field day; the narrator explains the regiment's treasured privilege of having the band play while the horses are watered.

The colonel thinks the regiment has mutinied or is drunk; the band doubles back, and the rest of the regiment scatters across the province in the dusk.

The colonel threatens to disband and court-martial everyone; the subaltern calmly disclaims responsibility; the second-in-command takes the colonel aside.

The colonel restores the drum-horse to its place and is cheered by the regiment; he worries he went back on his word, but his deputy says such things win loyalty without harming discipline.

The other witnesses flee, the accuser's counsel throws up the case, and the accused thrashes the accuser behind the court cells.

The wife blames herself, asks the station not to shun her or her child, and nurses her husband; the counter-charge is hushed up and they go home.

The verse epigraph alone: a Diana who stays forever fresh and fair while the years pass and everyone offers her praise.

A woman of the hill capital who never seems to age has become an institution; every young man is expected to worship her, and she keeps young people about her.

When he mentions his father is coming, she tells him she has a nineteen-year-old daughter arriving; his father arrives and is told at once how his son has been behaving.

The father tells him to cut his leave short; they call on her, and the father recognises her as the woman he worshipped long ago, while the son struggles to talk to her poised daughter.

After a proverb, the narrator sets down the words of a dying friend describing a hidden opium house in a narrow city lane that no outsider could find.

The house was opened by a one-eyed proprietor rumoured to have killed his wife; it was clean and respectable, and he never seemed touched by the drug but was very keen on money.

The upper room held the proprietor's idol and his own coffin, to which every newcomer was introduced; the speaker took his mat at the coffin's foot.

He can no longer work; the proprietor drew his money, gave him half to live on and kept the rest, and he did not care.

Of the ten first regulars, most are dead, sacked or murdered; he once had a wife, and people said his habit killed her.

He regulates his smoking by the dragons on the pillows, and uses the silver pipe the dead proprietor gave him, for the old man's sake.

He cannot leave: the nephew now draws his money and might kill him, and he fears dying anywhere else; the nephew gives no credit and brags of the house.

He hopes to die in the house like a woman who died there comfortably, on a clean mat with good stuff, and asks only that the nephew stop adulterating it.

After an epigraph, the narrator's household servant asks for an old polo-ball for his little son, and next day the narrator finds the child wandering in his dining-room.

Startled, the child howls; his father scolds him as a rascal bound for jail; the narrator sends word he is not angry, and the child insists he is not a rascal but a man.

A formal daily greeting grows up between the narrator and the solitary child, who builds little enclosures of flowers and broken china in the garden.

The narrator accidentally tramples the child's work; someone tells the boy the master was angry; reassured, the child builds grander and grander palaces for months.

One day the child is missing; he has a fever; within a week the narrator meets his father carrying the small body to the burial ground.

After a proverb, the narrator describes a rough young man who has comfortably nursed an unrequited attachment for four years to a girl long since married.

He contrives to see her constantly and deceives himself thoroughly: every look, gesture and tone is his old love's, though her nature is entirely different.

Bored by anything about her own life, he betrays himself; she asks why he attends her when he plainly does not care for her, and he blurts that he does not.

She scornfully learns she is a lay-figure for his old love; the season ends and he goes back to work, but cannot tell which woman fills his thoughts.

After a ballad epigraph, the narrator observes that everyone in the service believes his own small task is the pivot on which the whole administration turns.

After a month of doing his work badly, he conceives a great history to lay at her feet; she promises to wait a year, with an eye on his salary, and he takes leave.

After an epigraph, the narrator describes a sleepy, good-natured doctor and his wife who withdraw entirely from station society after their marriage.

He does his duties perfectly but will not be comforted; colleagues urge leave, and he goes on a walking tour with his late wife's idle, thieving favourite servant.

He says he has not sought death but will not be sorry; the servant begs him not to go and quits; the doctor goes alone and dies there within eleven days.

After an epigraph, the narrator helps a drunken loafer singing a love song in a caravanserai, who talks of Oxford haunts as though he had never left them.

The loafer, sobering, asks to be helped to his quarters among the horse-traders, apologising with literary flourishes for his disgrace.

He lists his consolations: his learning, his companion's love and a monument he has built in seven years, admitting he sold a book the narrator lent him.

He is proud and poor, refuses every gift and the hospital, and when pneumonia takes him he sends a note asking the narrator to help him die.

Dying, he drives off the doctor and has his companion bring out a bundle of manuscript, his book of what he saw and lived.

He bequeaths it to the narrator for his kindnesses, predicting he will mangle it, and charges him not to let it die.

He dies murmuring a prayer and not guilty, my Lord; nothing in his room says who he was; the narrator and a friend sort and cut the papers.