“And I shall welcome death and embrace the headsman ere making last speech and dying confession.  Having long desired to know what lies Beyond, I shall make virtue of necessity and seize opportunity (of getting to know) to play hero and die gamish.

“Not like the Pathan murderer who walked about in front of condemned cell with Koran balanced on head, crying to his Prophet to save him, and defying Englishes to touch him.  Of course they cooked his geese, Koran or not.  One warder does more than many Prophets in Gungapur Jail. (He!  He!  Quite good epigram and nice cynicality of educated man.) The degraded and unpolished fellow decoyed two little girls into empty house to steal their jewellery, and cut off fingers and noses and ears to get rings and nose-jewels and ear-drops, and left to die.  Holy Fakir, gentleman of course!  Pooh! and Bah! for all holy men.  I give spurnings to them all for fools, knaves, or hypocrites.  There are no gods any more for educated gentleman, except himself, and that’s very good god to worship and make offering to (Ha!  Ha!  What a wit will be lost to the silly world when it permits itself to lose me.)

“Well, to return to the sheep, as the European proverb has it.  I was born here in Gungapur, which will also have honour of being my death-and-cremation place, of poor but honest parent on thirty rupees a mensem.  He was very clever fellow and sent five sons to Primary School, Middle School, High School and Gungapur Government College at cost of over hundred rupees a month, all out of his thirty rupees a mensem.  He always used proverb ’Politeness lubricates wheels of life and palm also,’ and he obliged any man who made it worth his while.  But he fell into bad odours at hands of Mr. Spensonly owing to folly of bribing-fellow sending cash to office and the letter getting into Mr. Spensonly’s post-bag and opening by mistake.

“But the Sahib took me up into his office to soften blow to progenitor and that shows he was a bad man or his luck would not have been to take me in and give chance to murder him.

“My good old paternal parent made me work many hours each night, and though he knew nothing of the subjects he could read English and would hear all my lessons and other brothers’, and we had to say Skagger Rack, Cattegat, Scaw Fell and Helvellyn, and such things to him, and he would abuse us if we mis-arranged the figures and letters in CaH2O2 and H2SO4 and all those things in bottles.  Before the Matriculation Examination he made a Graduate, whom he had got under his thumb-nail, teach us all the answers to all the back questions in all subjects till we knew them all by heart, and also made us learn ten long essays by heart so as to make up the required essay out of parts of them.  He nearly killed my brother by starvation (saving food as well as punishing miscreant) for failing—­the only one of us who ever failed in any examination—­which he did by writing out all first chapter of Washington