To the Magistrate, Moussa Isa offered neither excuse nor prayer.  Explanation he vouchsafed in the words:—­

“He called me, Moussa Isa of the Somali, a Hubshi!”

Being of tender years and of insignificant stature he was condemned to flogging and seven years in a Reformatory School.  He was too juvenile for the Aden Jail.  The Reformatory School nearest to Aden is at Duri in India, and thither, in spite of earnest prayers that he might go to hard labour in Aden Jail like a man and a Somali, was Moussa Isa duly transported and therein incarcerated.

At the Duri Reformatory School, Moussa Isa was profoundly miserable, most unhappy, and deeply depressed by a sense of the very cruellest injustice.

For here they simply did not know the difference between a Somal and a woolly-haired dog of a negro.  They honestly did not know that there was a difference.  To them, a clicking Bushman was as a Nubian, an earth-eating Kattia as a Kabyle, a face-cicatrized, tooth-sharpened cannibal of the Aruwimi as a Danakil,—­a Hubshi as a Somal.  They simply did not know.  To them all Africans were Hubshis (just as to an English M.P. all the three or four hundred millions of Indians are Bengali babus).  They meant no insult; they knew no better.  All Africans were black niggers and every soul in the place, from Brahmin to Untouchable, looked down upon the African, the Black Man, the Nigger, the Cannibal, the Hubshi, sent from Africa to defile their Reformatory and destroy their caste.

Here, the proud self-respecting Moussa, jealous champion of the honour of his, to him, high and noble race, found himself a god-send to the Out-castes, the Untouchables, the Depressed Classes, Mangs, Mahars, and Sudras,—­they whose touch, nay the touch of whose very shadow, is defilement!  For, at last, they, too, had some one to look down upon, to despise, to insult.  After being the recipients-of-contempt as naturally and ordainedly as they were breathers-of-air, they at last could apply a salve, and pass on to another the utter contempt and loathing which they themselves received and accepted from the Brahmins and all those of Caste.  They had found one lower than themselves. Moussa Isa of the Somali was the out-cast of out-casts, the pariah of pariahs, prohibited from touching the untouchables, one of a class depressed below the depressed classes—­in short a Hubshi!

Even a broad-nosed, foreheadless, blubber—­lipped aborigine from the hill-jungles objected to his presence!

In the small, self-contained, self-supporting world of the Reformatory, it was Moussa Isa against the World.  And against the World he stood up.

It had to learn the difference between a Somali and a Hubshi at any cost—­the cost of Moussa’s life included.

What added to the sorrow of the situation was the realization of how charming and desirable a retreat the place was in itself,—­apart from its ignorant and stupid inhabitants.