a drummer-boy to empty, lime-washed barracks, whose floors were covered with rubbish and string and paper, and whose ceilings gave back his lonely footfall.  Native-fashion, he curled himself up on a stripped cot and went to sleep.  An angry man stumped down the veranda, woke him up, and said he was a schoolmaster.  This was enough for Kim, and he retired into his shell.  He could just puzzle out the various English Police notices in Lahore city, because they affected his comfort; and among the many guests of the woman who looked after him had been a queer German who painted scenery for the Parsee travelling theatre.  He told Kim that he had been ’on the barricades in ‘Forty-eight,’ and therefore — at least that was how it struck Kim — he would teach the boy to write in return for food.  Kim had been kicked as far as single letters, but did not think well of them.

‘I do not know anything.  Go away!’ said Kim, scenting evil.  Hereupon the man caught him by the ear, dragged him to a room in a far-off wing where a dozen drummer-boys were sitting on forms, and told him to be still if he could do nothing else.  This he managed very successfully.  The man explained something or other with white lines on a black board for at least half an hour, and Kim continued his interrupted nap.  He much disapproved of the present aspect of affairs, for this was the very school and discipline he had spent two-thirds of his young life in avoiding.  Suddenly a beautiful idea occurred to him, and he wondered that he had not thought of it before.

The man dismissed them, and first to spring through the veranda into the open sunshine was Kim.

’ ’Ere, you!  ‘Alt!  Stop!’ said a high voice at his heels.  ’I’ve got to look after you.  My orders are not to let you out of my sight.  Where are you goin’?’

It was the drummer-boy who had been hanging round him all the forenoon — a fat and freckled person of about fourteen, and Kim loathed him from the soles of his boots to his cap-ribbons.

‘To the bazar — to get sweets — for you,’ said Kim, after thought.

‘Well, the bazar’s out o’ bounds.  If we go there we’ll get a dressing-down.  You come back.’

‘How near can we go?’ Kim did not know what bounds meant, but he wished to be polite — for the present.

’ ’Ow near?  ’Ow far, you mean!  We can go as far as that tree down the road.’

‘Then I will go there.’

‘All right.  I ain’t goin’.  It’s too ’ot.  I can watch you from ’ere.  It’s no good your runnin’ away.  If you did, they’d spot you by your clothes.  That’s regimental stuff you’re wearin’.  There ain’t a picket in Umballa wouldn’t ’ead you back quicker than you started out.’