Tods was the idol of some eighty jhampanis, and half as many saises.  He saluted them all as ‘O Brother.’  It never entered his head that any living human being could disobey his orders; and he was the buffer between the servants and his Mamma’s wrath.  The working of that household turned on Tods, who was adored by every one from the dhoby to the dog-boy.  Even Futteh Khan, the villainous loafer khit from Mussoorie, shirked risking Tods’ displeasure for fear his co-mates should look down on him.

So Tods had honour in the land from Boileaugunge to Chota Simla, and ruled justly according to his lights.  Of course, he spoke Urdu, but he had also mastered many queer side-speeches like the chotee bolee of the women, and held grave converse with shopkeepers and Hill-coolies alike.  He was precocious for his age, and his mixing with natives had taught him some of the more bitter truths of life:  the meanness and the sordidness of it.  He used, over his bread and milk, to deliver solemn and serious aphorisms, translated from the vernacular into the English, that made his Mamma jump and vow that Tods must go Home next hot weather.  Just when Tods was in the bloom of his power, the Supreme Legislature were hacking out a Bill for the Sub-Montane Tracts, a revision of the then Act, smaller than the Punjab Land Bill, but affecting a few hundred thousand people none the less.  The Legal Member had built, and bolstered, and embroidered, and amended that Bill till it looked beautiful on paper.  Then the Council began to settle what they called the ‘minor details.’  As if any Englishman legislating for natives knows enough to know which are the minor and which are the major points, from the native point of view, of any measure!  That Bill was a triumph of ’safe-guarding the interests of the tenant.’  One clause provided that land should not be leased on longer terms than five years at a stretch; because, if the landlord had a tenant bound down for, say, twenty years, he would squeeze the very life out of him.  The notion was to keep up a stream of independent cultivators in the Sub-Montane Tracts; and ethnologically and politically the notion was correct.  The only drawback was that it was altogether wrong.  A native’s life in India implies the life of his son.  Wherefore, you cannot legislate for one generation at a time.  You must consider the next from the native point of view.  Curiously enough, the native now and then, and in Northern India more particularly, hates being over-protected against himself.  There was a Naga Village once, where they lived on dead and buried Commissariat mules....  But that is another story.