They were sons of subordinate officials in the Railway, Telegraph, and Canal Services; of warrant-officers, sometimes retired and sometimes acting as commanders-in-chief to a feudatory Rajah’s army; of captains of the Indian Marine Government pensioners, planters, Presidency shopkeepers, and missionaries.  A few were cadets of the old Eurasian houses that have taken strong root in Dhurrumtollah — Pereiras, De Souzas, and D’Silvas.  Their parents could well have educated them in England, but they loved the school that had served their own youth, and generation followed sallow-hued generation at St Xavier’s.  Their homes ranged from Howrah of the railway people to abandoned cantonments like Monghyr and Chunar; lost tea-gardens Shillong-way; villages where their fathers were large landholders in Oudh or the Deccan; Mission-stations a week from the nearest railway line; seaports a thousand miles south, facing the brazen Indian surf; and cinchona-plantations south of all.  The mere story of their adventures, which to them were no adventures, on their road to and from school would have crisped a Western boy’s hair.  They were used to jogging off alone through a hundred miles of jungle, where there was always the delightful chance of being delayed by tigers; but they would no more have bathed in the English Channel in an English August than their brothers across the world would have lain still while a leopard snuffed at their palanquin.  There were boys of fifteen who had spent a day and a half on an islet in the middle of a flooded river, taking charge, as by right, of a camp of frantic pilgrims returning from a shrine.  There were seniors who had requisitioned a chance-met Rajah’s elephant, in the name of St Francis Xavier, when the Rains once blotted out the cart-track that led to their father’s estate, and had all but lost the huge beast in a quicksand.  There was a boy who, he said, and none doubted, had helped his father to beat off with rifles from the veranda a rush of Akas in the days when those head-hunters were bold against lonely plantations.

And every tale was told in the even, passionless voice of the native-born, mixed with quaint reflections, borrowed unconsciously from native foster-mothers, and turns of speech that showed they had been that instant translated from the vernacular.  Kim watched, listened, and approved.  This was not insipid, single-word talk of drummer-boys.  It dealt with a life he knew and in part understood.  The atmosphere suited him, and he throve by inches.  They gave him a white drill suit as the weather warmed, and he rejoiced in the new-found bodily comforts as he rejoiced to use his sharpened mind over the tasks they set him.  His quickness would have delighted an English master; but at St Xavier’s they know the first rush of minds developed by sun and surroundings, as they know the half-collapse that sets in at twenty-two or twenty-three.

None the less he remembered to hold himself lowly.  When tales were told of hot nights, Kim did not sweep the board with his reminiscences; for St Xavier’s looks down on boys who ’go native all-together.’  One must never forget that one is a Sahib, and that some day, when examinations are passed, one will command natives.  Kim made a note of this, for he began to understand where examinations led.