And then Moussa was knocked head over heels and sat upon by the overseer in charge of the garden-gang, while the Brahmin twitched convulsively on the ground.  He was by no means dead, however, and the sole immediate results, to Moussa, were penal diet, solitary confinement in his palatial cell, a severe sentence of corn-grinding with the heavy quern, and most joyous recollections of the sound of the water-can on the pate of the foe.

“I have still to kill you, of course,” he whispered to his victim, the next time they met, and the Brahmin went in terror of his life.  He was a very clever young person and had passed an astounding number of examinations in the course of his brief career.  But he was not courageous, and his “education” had given him skill in nothing practical, except in penmanship, which skill he had devoted to forgery.

“Why did you violently commit this dastardish deed, and assault the harmless peaceful Brahmin?” asked the Superintendent, a worthy and voluble babu, and then translated the question into debased Hindustani.

“He called me Hubshi, and I will kill him,” replied Moussa.

“Oho! and you kill everyone who calls you Hubshi, do you, Master African?”

“I do.  I wish to go to Aden Jail for attempting murder.  It will be murder if I am kept here where none knows a man from a dog.”

“Oho!  And you would kill even me, I suppose, if I called you Hubshi.”

“Of course!  I will kill you in any case if I am not sent to Aden Jail.”

The babu decided that it was high time for some other institution to shelter this touchy and truculent person, and that he would lay the case before the next weekly Visitor and ask for it to be submitted to the Committee at their ensuing monthly meeting.

The Visitor of the week happened to be the Educational Inspector.  “Wants to leave India, does he?” said the Inspector, looking Moussa over as he heard the statement of the Superintendent.  “I admire his taste.  India is a magnificent country to leave.”

The Educational Inspector, a very keen, thoughtful and competent educationist, was a disappointed man, like so many of his Service.  He felt that he had, for quarter of a century, strenuously woven ropes of sand.  When his liver was particularly sluggish he felt that for quarter of a century he had worked industriously, not at a useless thing, but at an evil thing—­a terrible belief.

Moreover, after quarter of a century of faithful labour and strict economy, he found himself with a load of debt, broken health, and a cheaply educated family of boys and girls to whom he was a complete stranger—­merely the man who found the money and sent it Home, visiting them from time to time at intervals of four or five years.  India had killed his wife, and broken him.

He had had what seemed to him to be bitter experience also.  An individual, notoriously slack and incompetent, ten years his junior, had been promoted over his head, because he was somebody’s cousin and the kind of fatuous ass that only labours industriously in drawing-rooms and at functions, recuperating by slacking idly in offices and at duties—­a paltry but paying game much practised by a very small class in India.