Lady Mary: Very proper sentiments. You are a good soul, Crichton.-Crichton (still talking to Lady Mary): No, my lady; his lordship may compell us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants' hall.

Lord Loam (overhearing this): What's that? No equality? Can't you see, Crichton, that our divisions into classes are artificial, that if we were to return to Nature, which is the aspiration of my life, all would be equal? Crichton: If I may make so bold as to contradict your lordship— Lord Loam (with an effort): Go on.

Crichton: The divisions into classes, my lord, are not artificial. They are the natural outcome of a civilised society. (To Lady Mary.) There must always be a master and servants in all civilised communities, my lady, for it is natural, and whatever is natural is right.

Lord Loam (wincing): It is very unnatural for me to stand here and allow you to talk such nonsense.

Crichton (eagerly): Yes, my lord, it is. That is what I have been striving to point out to your lordship.

[After a quarrel caused by Miss Fisher's jealousy of rank, his lordship proceeds to making a speech to the party. In the middle of it he sticks, after having announced that, to reduce "the excessive luxury of the day", his daughters, instead of having one maid each, shall only have one maid between them on their projected yacht voyage across the ocean. General rising from tea. The three daughters, left alone, "have an opportunity to air their indignation".]

Lady Mary: One maid among three grown women! What's to be done? Ernest: Pooh! You must do for yourselves, that's all.

Lady Mary: Do for ourselves. How can we know where our things are kept?

Agatha: Are you aware that dresses button up the back?

Catherine: How are we to get into our shoes and be prepared for the carriage?

Lady Mary: Who is to put us to bed, and who is to get us up, and how shall we ever know it's morning if there is no one to pull up the blinds?

[Each of the loving sisters tries to keep her own maid for common service on the yacht, but the maids refuse one after the other and give notice. Finally the kitchenmaid has to take their place, and for the Lord's own valet nobody can be found, for the moment, but Crichton the butler himself; after a terrible struggle, he agrees to become a valet.]

Catherine: Father, how good of him.

Lord Loam (Pleased, but thinking it a small thing): Uncommon good. Thank you, Crichton.... Not that I think you have lowered yourself in any way. Come along. (Crichton is stopped by Agatha impulsively offering him her hand.)

Crichton (who is much shaken): My lady-a valet's hand.

Agatha: I had no idea you would feel it so deeply; why did you do it? (Crichton is too respectful to reply.)

Lady Mary (regarding him): Crichton, I am curious. I insist upon an

answer.

Crichton: My lady, I am the son of a butler and a lady's maid--perhaps the happiest of all combinations; and to me the most beautiful thing in the world is a haughty, aristocratic English house, with every one kept in his place. Though I were equal to your ladyship, where would be the pleasure to me? If would be counterbalanced by the pain of feeling that Thomas and John were equal to me.

Catherine: But father says if we were to return to Nature— Crichton: If we did, my lady, the first thing we should do would be to elect a head. Circumstances might alter cases; the same person might not be master; the same persons might not be servants. I can't say as to that, nor should we have the deciding of it. Nature would decide for us.

[And indeed, they return to nature by getting shipwrecked near some lonely tropical island. There is no choice, they must acknowledge the clever, plucky butler as their master. As his rule is, though irresistible, yet just and benevolent, they all fall in love with him. It is not the kitchenmaid, it is Lady Mary, by then a strong and skilled hunter, clothed in hides, whom he accepts as future queen of his kingdom-when, at this very point of the "natural development", an English ship arrives, and every one instinctively glides back into his former position. There follows a very funny fourth act, in which the admirable butler once more saves all of them the discovery of the humble parts they had played in the state of nature.] (Act I, slightly shortened).

Rudyard Kipling.

(born 1865)

Lispeth and the Christians.

She was the daughter of Sonoo, a Hill-man, and Jadéh his wife. One year their maize failed, and two bears spent the night in their only poppy-field just above the Sutlej Valely on the Kotgarh side; so, next season, they turned Christian, and brought their baby to the Mission to be baptised. The Kotgarh Chaplain christened her Elizabeth, and "Lispeth" is the Hill or pahari pronunciation.

Later, cholera came into the Kotgarh Valley and carried off Sonoo and Jadéh, and Lispeth became half servant, half companion, to the wife of the then Chaplain of Kotgarh. This was after the reign of the Moravian 1) missionaries, but before Kotgarh had quite forgotten her title of "Mistress of the Northern Hills."

Whether Christianity improved Lispeth, or whether the gods of her own people would have done as much for her under any circumstances,

I do not know; but she grew very lovely. When a Hill girl grows lovely, she is worth travelling fifty miles over bad ground to look upon. Lispeth had a Greek face-one of those faces people paint so often, and see so seldom. She was of a pale, ivory colour and, for her race, extremely tall. Also, she possessed eyes that were wonderful; and, had she not been dressed in the abominable print-cloths affected by Missions, you would, meeting her on the hill side unexpectedly, have thought her the original Diana of the Romans going out to slay.2)

Lispeth took to Christianity readily, and did not abandon it when she reached womanhood, as do some Hill girls. Her own people hated her because she had, they said, become a memsahib and washed herself daily; and the Chaplain's wife did not know what to do with her. Somehow, one cannot ask a stately goddess, five foot ten in her shoes, to clean plates and dishes. So she played with the Chaplain's children and took classes in the Sunday School, and read all the books in the house, and grew more and more beautiful, like the Princesses in fairy tales. The Chaplain's wife said that the girl ought to take service in Simla as a nurse or something "genteel." But Lispeth did not want to take service. She was very happy where she was.

When travellers-there were not many in those years-came in to Kotgarh, Lispeth used to lock herself into her own room for fear they might take her away to Simla, or somewhere out into the unknown world.

One day, a few months after she was seventeen years old, Lispeth went out for a walk. She did not walk in the manner of English ladies—a mile and a half out, and a ride back again. She covered between twenty and thirty miles in her little constitutionals, all about and about, between Kotgarh and Narkunda. This time she came back at full dusk, stepping down the breakneck descent into Kotgarh with something heavy in her arms. The Chaplain's wife was dozing in the drawingroom when Lispeth came in breathing hard and very exhausted with her burden. Lispeth put it down on the sofa, and said simply:-"This is my husband. I found him on the Bagi Road. He has hurt himself. We will nurse him, and when he is well, your husband shall marry him to me."

This was the first mention Lispeth had ever made of her matrimonial views, and the Chaplains's wife shrieked with horror. However, the man on the sofa needed attention first. He was a young Englishman, and his head had been cut to the bone by something jagged. Lispeth said she had found him down the khud, so she had brought him in. He was breathing queerly and was unconscious.

2) Supply deer.

He was put to bed and tended by the Chaplain who knew something of medicine; and Lispeth waited outside the door in case she could be useful. She explained to the Chaplain that this was the man she meant to marry; and the Chaplain and his wife lectured her severely on the impropriety of her conduct. Lispeth listened quietly, and repeated her first propositon. It takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out uncivilized Eastern instincts, such as falling in love at first sight. Lispeth, having found the man she worshipped, did not see why she should keep silent as to her choice. She had no intention of being sent away, either. She was going to nurse that Englishman until he was well enough to marry her. This was her little programme.

After a fortnight of slight fever and inflammation, the Englishman recovered coherence and thanked the Chaplain and his wife, and Lispeth-especially Lispeth--for their kindness. He was a traveller in the East, he said they never talked about "globe-trotters" in those days, when the P. & O.3) fleet was young and small-and had come from Dehra Dun to hunt for plants and butterflies among the Simla hills. No one at Simla, therefore, knew anything about him. He fancied he must have fallen over the cliff while stalking a fern on a rotten tree-trunk, and that his coolies) must have stolen his baggage and fled. He thought he would go back to Simla when he was a little stronger. He desired no more mountaineering.

He made small haste to go away, and recovered his strength slowly. Lispeth objected to being advised either by the Chaplain or his wife; so the latter spoke to the Englishman, and told him how matters stood in Lispeth's heart. He laughed a good deal, and said it was very pretty and romantic, a perfect idyl of the Himalayas; but, as he was engaged to a girl at Home, he fancied that nothing would happen. Certainly he would behave with discretion. He did that. Still he found it very pleasant to talk to Lispeth, and walk with Lispeth, and say nice things to her, and call her pet names while he was getting strong enough to go away. It meant nothing at all to him, and everything in the world to Lispeth. She was very happy while the fortnight lasted, because she had found a man to love.

Being a savage by birth, she took no trouble to hide her feelings, and the Englishman was amused. When he went away, Lispeth walked with him up the Hill as far as Narkunda, very troubled and very miserable. The Chaplain's wife, being a good Christian and disliking anything in the shape of fuss or scandal-Lispeth was beyond her management entirely-had told the Englishman to tell Lispeth that

3) Peninsular (Iberian) and Oriental (Company).

he was coming back to marry her. "She is but a child you know, and, I fear, at heart a heathen," said the Chaplain's wife. So all the twelve miles up the hill the Englishman, with his arm round Lispeth's waist, was assuring the girl that he would come back and marry her; and Lispeth made him promise over and over again. She wept on the Narkunda Ridge till he had passed out of sight along the Muttiani path.

Then she dried her tears and went in to Kotgarh again, and said to the Chaplain's wife: "He will come back and marry me. He has gone to his own people to tell them so." And the Chaplain's wife soothed Lispeth and said: "He will come back." At the end of two months, Lispeth grew impatient, and was told that the Englishman had gone over the seas to England. She knew where England was, because she had read little geography primers; but, of course, she had no conception of the nature of the sea, being a Hill girl. There was an old puzzle-map of the World in the house. Lispeth had played with it when she was a child. She unearthed it again, and put it together of evenings, and cried to herself, and tried to imagine where her Englishman was. As she had no ideas of distance or steamboats, her notions were somewhat erroneous. It would not have made the least difference had she been perfectly correct; for the Englishman had no intention of coming back to marry a Hill girl. He forgot all about her by the time he was butterflyhunting in Assam. He wrote a book on the East afterwards. Lispeth's name did not appear.

At the end of three months, Lispeth made daily pilgrimage to Narkunda to see if her Englishman was coming along the road. It gave her comfort, and the Chaplain's wife finding her happier thought that she was getting over her "barbarous and most indelicate folly." A little later the walks ceased to help Lispeth and her temper grew very bad. The Chaplain's wife thought this a profitable time to let her know the real state of affairs-that the Englishman had only promised his love to keep her quiet-that he had never meant anything, and that it was "wrong and improper" of Lispeth to think of marriage with an Englishman, who was of a superior clay, besides being promised in marriage to a girl of his own people. Lispeth said that all this was clearly impossible because he had said he loved her, and the Chaplain's wife had, with her own lips, asserted that the Englishman was coming back.

"How can what he and you said be untrue?" asked Lispeth.

"We said it as an excuse to keep you quiet, child," said the Chaplain's wife.

"Then you have lied to me," said Lispeth, “you and he?”

The Chaplain's wife bowed her head, and said nothing. Lispeth was