There was a faint laugh first, and then the group sucked at their pipes decisively as they watched the doings in the _post-mortem_. Though they would have scouted the suggestion, the _shâhbâsh wallah_ had justified his calling; for patriotism brings courage with it. He did not trouble his head about justification, however. Some one, in his experience, always did the shouting, and it suited him better than more active occupation, for he was lame; stiff, too, in his back. Surgeon-Major Pringle, coming in later to find the _post-mortem_ very much as it had been hours before, looked at him distastefully, and began a remark about what two English workmen could have done, which Surgeon-Captain Terence O'Brien interrupted with his charming smile: "Sure, sir, the sun rises a considerable trifle airlier East than West, an' that's enough energy for wan hemisphere. Besides, ye can't get on in India without a _shâhbâsh wallah_. Or elsewhere, for that matter. Ye always require 'the something not ourselves which makes for righteousness'--" "Makes for fiddlesticks!" muttered the senior under his breath, adding aloud, "Who the dickens is the _shâhbâsh wallah_ when he is at home, and what's his work?" He asked the question almost reluctantly, for his junior's extremely varied information had, since the morning, imparted a vague uncertainty to a round world which had hitherto, in Dr. Pringle's estimation of it, been absolutely sure--cocksure! "What is he? Oh! he's a variety of names. He's objective reality, moral sanction, antecedent experience, unconditioned good. Ye can take yer choice of the lot, sir; and if ye can't win the thrick with metaphysics--I can't, and that's the thruth--play thrumps. Sentiment!--sympathy! Ye can't go wrong there. Ye can't leave them out of life's equation, East or West. Just some one--a fool, maybe--to say ye're a fine fellow, an' no misthake, at the very moment whin ye know ye're not. Biogenesis, sir, is the Law of Life. As Schopenhauer says, the secret that two is wan, is the--" His senior gave an exasperated sigh, and preferred changing the subject. So at the appointed time, no sooner, no later, the last patter of pink tears fell from the brushes upon the floor of the _post-mortem_ and upon the still figure, which might have been a corpse save for its drowsy applause--"Bravo, boys, bravo!" Then the caterpillar ladders, with the decorators and the pots of colour-wash and the brushes still attached to them, crawled away, and the _shâhbâsh wallah_ followed in their wake, his skin bearing mute evidence to the amount of work he had provoked.