im lit a rank cigarette--he had been careful to buy a stock in the
bazar--and lay down to think. This solitary passage was very different
from that joyful down-journey in the third-class with the lama.
'Sahibs get little pleasure of travel,' he reflected.

'Hai mai! I go from one place to another as it might be a kickball. It
is my Kismet. No man can escape his Kismet. But I am to pray to Bibi
Miriam, and I am a Sahib.' He looked at his boots ruefully. 'No; I am
Kim. This is the great world, and I am only Kim. Who is Kim?' He
considered his own identity, a thing he had never done before, till his
head swam. He was one insignificant person in all this roaring whirl
of India, going southward to he knew not what fate.

Presently the Colonel sent for him, and talked for a long time. So far
as Kim could gather, he was to be diligent and enter the Survey of
India as a chain-man. If he were very good, and passed the proper
examinations, he would be earning thirty rupees a month at seventeen
years old, and Colonel Creighton would see that he found suitable
employment.

Kim pretended at first to understand perhaps one word in three of this
talk. Then the Colonel, seeing his mistake, turned to fluent and
picturesque Urdu and Kim was contented. No man could be a fool who
knew the language so intimately, who moved so gently and silently, and
whose eyes were so different from the dull fat eyes of other Sahibs.

'Yes, and thou must learn how to make pictures of roads and mountains
and rivers, to carry these pictures in thine eye till a suitable time
comes to set them upon paper. Perhaps some day, when thou art a
chain-man, I may say to thee when we are working together: "Go across
those hills and see what lies beyond." Then one will say: "There are
bad people living in those hills who will slay the chain-man if he be
seen to look like a Sahib." What then?'

Kim thought. Would it be safe to return the Colonel's lead?

'I would tell what that other man had said.'

'But if I answered: "I will give thee a hundred rupees for knowledge
of what is behind those hills--for a picture of a river and a little
news of what the people say in the villages there"?'

'How can I tell? I am only a boy. Wait till I am a man.' Then,
seeing the Colonel's brow clouded, he went on: 'But I think I should
in a few days earn the hundred rupees.'

'By what road?'

Kim shook his head resolutely. 'If I said how I would earn the