take his brother out for a ride on one of
these ungainly animals. Then, when the harvest was ripening, a bed was
fastened up at the top of four high poles, and he had to sit all day
on this to protect the crops from the birds. For this purpose cords
are fastened across the field up to the bed, and oil-cans or other
pieces of tin are fastened to them here and there, so that as Abdul
Majid had all the ends of the cords in his hands, he could make a din
in any part of the field where he wished to frighten away the birds,
and sometimes was able to take half a dozen home for the evening meal.

'Alam Gul, on the other hand, was being initiated into the mysteries
of the Hindustani language and of arithmetic.

The school was a little mud building in the centre of the village, and
the schoolmaster was a Muhammadan from the Panjab, who found himself
rather uncomfortable in the midst of these frontier Pathans, whose
language seemed to him so uncouth and their habits so barbarous. His
meagre salary of ten rupees (13s. 4d.) a month was somewhat augmented
by his holding the additional post of village postmaster; but it had
this disadvantage--that when one of the villagers came in to buy an
envelope, and get the postmaster to address it, as probably he did not
know how to write himself, teaching had to be dropped for a season:
for it must be remembered that for a Pathan villager to send off a
letter is quite an event, and he may well afford to spend a quarter
of an hour or so, and give the postmaster a few annas extra to get
it properly addressed and despatched to his satisfaction. Meantime,
'Alam Gul and his companions would take the opportunity of drawing
figures on the sand of the floor, or of playing with a tame bullfinch
or a quail, which they were fond of bringing into the school.

To make up for these little interruptions, the schoolmaster used to
sit from morning to night, and expect his pupils to be there almost
as long, only giving them an interval of about an hour or so in the
middle of the day to go home and get their morning meal. Friday used
to be a whole holiday, for it was on that day that all the men of
the village had to assemble in the mosque for the morning prayers,
and when these were over 'Alam Gul used to go out with some of the
elder village boys to catch quails in the fields. This they did by
means of a long net spread across about thirty or forty feet of the
field. The quails were driven up into this, and