drag us from
the Way!'

Hurree Babu came out from behind the dovecote washing his teeth with
ostentatious ritual. Full-fleshed, heavy-haunched, bull-necked, and
deep-voiced, he did not look like 'a fearful man'. Kim signed almost
imperceptibly that matters were in good train, and when the morning
toilet was over, Hurree Babu, in flowery speech, came to do honour to
the lama. They ate, of course, apart, and afterwards the old lady,
more or less veiled behind a window, returned to the vital business of
green-mango colics in the young. The lama's knowledge of medicine was,
of course, sympathetic only. He believed that the dung of a black
horse, mixed with sulphur, and carried in a snake-skin, was a sound
remedy for cholera; but the symbolism interested him far more than the
science. Hurree Babu deferred to these views with enchanting
politeness, so that the lama called him a courteous physician. Hurree
Babu replied that he was no more than an inexpert dabbler in the
mysteries; but at least--he thanked the Gods therefore--he knew when he
sat in the presence of a master. He himself had been taught by the
Sahibs, who do not consider expense, in the lordly halls of Calcutta;
but, as he was ever first to acknowledge, there lay a wisdom behind
earthly wisdom--the high and lonely lore of meditation. Kim looked on
with envy. The Hurree Babu of his knowledge--oily, effusive, and
nervous--was gone; gone, too, was the brazen drug-vendor of overnight.
There remained--polished, polite, attentive--a sober, learned son of
experience and adversity, gathering wisdom from the lama's lips. The
old lady confided to Kim that these rare levels were beyond her. She
liked charms with plenty of ink that one could wash off in water,
swallow, and be done with. Else what was the use of the Gods? She
liked men and women, and she spoke of them--of kinglets she had known
in the past; of her own youth and beauty; of the depredations of
leopards and the eccentricities of love Asiatic; of the incidence of
taxation, rack-renting, funeral ceremonies, her son-in-law (this by
allusion, easy to be followed), the care of the young, and the age's
lack of decency. And Kim, as interested in the life of this world as
she soon to leave it, squatted with his feet under the hem of his robe,
drinking all in, while the lama demolished one after another every
theory of body-curing put forward by Hurree Babu.

At noon the Babu strapped up his brass-bound d