anoo by
a soldier. To-day, only Janoo lives in the upper rooms. Suddhoo sleeps
on the roof generally, except when he sleeps in the street. He used
to go to Peshawar in the cold weather to visit his son, who sells
curiosities near the Edwardes' Gate, and then he slept under a real mud
roof. Suddhoo is a great friend of mine, because his cousin had a son
who secured, thanks to my recommendation, the post of head-messenger
to a big firm in the Station. Suddhoo says that God will make me a
Lieutenant-Governor one of these days. I daresay his prophecy will come
true. He is very, very old, with white hair and no teeth worth showing,
and he has outlived his wits--outlived nearly everything except his
fondness for his son at Peshawar. Janoo and Azizun are Kashmiris,
Ladies of the City, and theirs was an ancient and more or less honorable
profession; but Azizun has since married a medical student from the
North-West and has settled down to a most respectable life somewhere
near Bareilly. Bhagwan Dass is an extortionate and an adulterator. He
is very rich. The man who is supposed to get his living by seal-cutting
pretends to be very poor. This lets you know as much as is necessary of
the four principal tenants in the house of Suddhoo. Then there is Me,
of course; but I am only the chorus that comes in at the end to explain
things. So I do not count.

Suddhoo was not clever. The man who pretended to cut seals was the
cleverest of them all--Bhagwan Dass only knew how to lie--except Janoo.
She was also beautiful, but that was her own affair.

Suddhoo's son at Peshawar was attacked by pleurisy, and old Suddhoo
was troubled. The seal-cutter man heard of Suddhoo's anxiety and made
capital out of it. He was abreast of the times. He got a friend in
Peshawar to telegraph daily accounts of the son's health. And here the
story begins.

Suddhoo's cousin's son told me, one evening, that Suddhoo wanted to see
me; that he was too old and feeble to come personally, and that I should
be conferring an everlasting honor on the House of Suddhoo if I went to
him. I went; but I think, seeing how well-off Suddhoo was then, that he
might have sent something better than an ekka, which jolted fearfully,
to haul out a future Lieutenant-Governor to the City on a muggy April
evening. The ekka did not run quickly. It was full dark when we pulled
up opposite the door of Ranjit Singh's Tomb near the main gate of the
Fort. Here was Suddhoo and he said that, b