Indian Tales

Indian Tales

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Indian Tales, by Rudyard Kipling
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Title: Indian Tales
Author: Rudyard Kipling
Release Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8649] [This file was first posted
on July 29, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English

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INDIAN TALES
BY RUDYARD KIPLING

CONTENTS
"The Finest Story in the World"
With the Main Guard
Wee Willie Winkie
The Rout of the White Hussars
At Twenty-two
The Courting of Dinah Shadd
The Story of Muhammad Din
In Flood Time
My Own True Ghost Story
The Big Drunk Draf'
By Word of Mouth
The Drums of the Fore and Aft
The Sending of Dana Da
On the City Wall
The Broken-link Handicap
On Greenhow Hill
To Be Filed for Reference
The Man Who Would Be King
The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney
His Majesty the King
The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes
In the House of Suddhoo
Black Jack

The Taking of Lungtungpen
The Phantom Rickshaw
On the Strength of a Likeness
Private Learoyd's Story
Wressley of the Foreign Office
The Solid Muldoon
The Three Musketeers
Beyond the Pale
The God from the Machine
The Daughter of the Regiment
The Madness of Private Ortheris
L'Envoi

"THE FINEST STORY IN THE WORLD"
"Or ever the knightly years were gone With the old world to the grave,
I was a king in Babylon And you were a Christian slave," --_W.E.
Henley_.
His name was Charlie Mears; he was the only son of his mother who
was a widow, and he lived in the north of London, coming into the City
every day to work in a bank. He was twenty years old and suffered
from aspirations. I met him in a public billiard-saloon where the marker
called him by his given name, and he called the marker "Bullseyes."
Charlie explained, a little nervously, that he had only come to the place
to look on, and since looking on at games of skill is not a cheap
amusement for the young, I suggested that Charlie should go back to
his mother.
That was our first step toward better acquaintance. He would call on me
sometimes in the evenings instead of running about London with his
fellow-clerks; and before long, speaking of himself as a young man
must, he told me of his aspirations, which were all literary. He desired
to make himself an undying name chiefly through verse, though he was
not above sending stories of love and death to the
drop-a-penny-in-the-slot journals. It was my fate to sit still while
Charlie read me poems of many hundred lines, and bulky fragments of
plays that would surely shake the world. My reward was his unreserved
confidence, and the self-revelations and troubles of a young man are
almost as holy as those of a maiden. Charlie had never fallen in love,

but was anxious to do so on the first opportunity; he believed in all
things good and all things honorable, but, at the same time, was
curiously careful to let me see that he knew his way about the world as
befitted a bank clerk on twenty-five shillings a week. He rhymed
"dove" with "love" and "moon" with "June," and devoutly believed that
they had never so been rhymed before. The long lame gaps in his plays
he filled up with hasty words of apology and description and swept on,
seeing all that he intended to do so clearly that he esteemed it already
done, and turned to me for applause.
I fancy that his mother did not encourage his aspirations, and I know
that his writing-table at home was the edge of his washstand. This he
told me almost at the outset of our acquaintance; when he was ravaging
my bookshelves, and a little before I was