e, sat Mr. Edward
Jones.

Mr. Edward Jones had been shot with bewildering suddenness from
Cambridge quadrangles into the Indian Educational Service. Of India he
knew nothing, of education he knew less, but boldly took it upon him to
combine the two unknowns for the earning of his living. If wise and
beneficent men offered him a modest wage for becoming a professor and
exponent of that which he did not know, he had no objection to accepting
it; but there were people who wondered why it should be that, out of
forty million English people, Mr. Edward Jones should be the chosen one
to represent England to the youth of Duri, and asked whether there were
no keen, strictly conscientious, sporting, strong Englishmen available;
no enthusiastic educational experts left in all the British Isles, that
Mr. Edward Jones of all people had come to Duri?

"What do you want?" he asked (how he hated these poverty-stricken,
smelly, ignoble creatures. Why was he not a master at Eton, instead of
at Duri High School. Why wouldn't somebody give him a handsome income
for looking handsome and standing around beautifully--like these
aide-de-camp Johnnies and "staff" people. Since there was nothing on
earth he could do well, he ought to have been provided with a job in
which he could look well).

"May I borrow the Sahib's knife?" asked Moussa Isa, "I have broken my
pencil and cannot draw." Mr. Edward Jones picked up the penknife that
lay on his desk, the cheap article of restricted utility supplied to
Government Offices by the Stationery Department, and handed it to Moussa
Isa. Even as he took it with respectful salaam, Moussa Isa summed up its
possibilities. Blade two inches long, sharp-pointed, handle six inches
long, wooden; not a clasp knife, blade immovable in handle. It would
do--and he turned to go to his seat and presumably to sharpen his
pencil.

Idly watching the boy and thinking of other things, Jones saw him try
the point of the knife on his thumb, walk up behind the other occupant
of his desk, his Brahmin neighbour, seize that neighbour by the hair,
push his head sharp over on to the shoulder, and plunge the knife into
his neck; seat himself, and commence to draw with the unfortunate
Brahmin's pencil.

Jones sprang to his feet and rushed to the spot, to find that he had not
been dreaming. No--on the back seat drooped a boy bleeding like a stuck
pig and another industriously drawing, his face illuminated by a smile
of contentmen