the other's
surprised eyes with recognition of brotherhood and opened a straight
way into his confidence. In two minutes the man--perhaps a wild hawk
from the Afghan hills--would be pouring out into the ear of this
sahib, with heaven-sent knowledge and sympathy, the weird tale of the
blood feud and litigation, the border fray, and the usurer's iniquity,
which had driven him so far afield as Lahore from Bajaur. To Kipling
even the most suspected and suspicious of classes, the religious
mendicants, would open their mouths freely.

"By the road thick with the dust of camels and thousands of cattle and
goats, which winds from Lahore Fort to the River Ravi, there are
walled caravanserais the distant smell of which more than suffices for
most of the Europeans who pass, but sitting with the travelers in the
reeking inside Kipling heard weird tales and gathered much knowledge.
Under a spreading peepul tree overhanging a well by the same road
squatted daily a ring of almost naked fakirs, smeared with ashes, who
scowled at the European driving by; but for Kipling there was, when he
wished it, an opening in the squatting circle and much to be learned
from the unsavory talkers. That is how Kipling's finished
word-pictures take the lifelike aspect of instantaneous photographs."

XLVI

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN RUNS AWAY

Benjamin Franklin had so many strong qualities, was eminent in so many
lines of endeavor, that we do not always include him among the
literary men of America. However, his _Autobiography_ is a
masterpiece. In sincerity and simplicity it is unsurpassed. This is
all the more remarkable because it was written at a time when ornate
writing was the fashion. A man's style is the outgrowth of his nature,
and it is a striking comment upon the robust quality of Franklin's
mind that his style has the simplicity of the Bible, or _Pilgrim's
Progress_.

The following account, taken from his _Autobiography_, begins just
after he has landed in New York, a boy of seventeen who has run away
from home because he felt that his brother was not treating him
fairly:

My inclinations for the sea were by this time worn out, or I might now
have gratified them. But, having a trade, and supposing myself a
pretty good workman, I offered my service to the printer in the place,
old Mr. William Bradford, who had been the first printer in
Pennsylvania, but removed from thence upon the quarrel of George
Keith. He could give me no employme