he last moment. Nothing can be wholly
beautiful that is not useful, and therefore my verses were made to ease
off the perpetual strife between the manager extending his
advertisements and my chief fighting for his reading-matter. They were
born to be sacrificed. Rukn-Din, the foreman of our side, approved of
them immensely, for he was a Muslim of culture. He would say: 'Your
potery very good, sir; just coming proper length to-day. You giving more
soon? One-third column just proper. Always can take on third page.'

Mahmoud, who set them up, had an unpleasant way of referring to a new
lyric as '_Ek aur chiz_'--one more thing--which I never liked. The job
side, too, were unsympathetic, because I used to raid into their type
for private proofs with old English and Gothic headlines. Even a Hindoo
does not like to find the serifs of his f's cut away to make long s's.

And in this manner, week by week, my verses came to be printed in the
paper. I was in very good company, for there is always an undercurrent
of song, a little bitter for the most part, running through the Indian
papers. The bulk of it is much better than mine, being more graceful,
and is done by those less than Sir Alfred Lyall--to whom I would
apologise for mentioning his name in this gallery--'Pekin,' 'Latakia,'
'Cigarette,' 'O.,' 'T. W.,' 'Foresight,' and others, whose names come up
with the stars out of the Indian Ocean going eastward.

Sometimes a man in Bangalore would be moved to song, and a man on the
Bombay side would answer him, and a man in Bengal would echo back, till
at last we would all be crowing together like cocks before daybreak,
when it is too dark to see your fellow. And, occasionally, some unhappy
Chaaszee, away in the China Ports, would lift up his voice among the
tea-chests, and the queer-smelling yellow papers of the Far East brought
us his sorrows. The newspaper files showed that, forty years ago, the
men sang of just the same subjects as we did--of heat, loneliness, love,
lack of promotion, poverty, sport, and war. Further back still, at the
end of the eighteenth century, Hickey's _Bengal Gazette_, a very wicked
little sheet in Calcutta, published the songs of the young factors,
ensigns, and writers to the East India Company. They, too, wrote of the
same things, but in those days men were strong enough to buy a bullock's
heart for dinner, cook it with their own hands because they could not
afford a servant, and make a rhymed jest of al