Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book IIKipling, Rudyard
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Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II
Kipling, Rudyard
Poetry; Short stories
"Where," demanded Punch, wearied of a loathsome contrivance on four
wheels with a mound of luggage atop--"where is our broom-gharri? This
thing talks so much that I can't talk. Where is our own broom-gharri?
When I was at Bandstand before we comed away, I asked Inverarity Sahib
why he was sitting in it, and he said it was his own. And I said, 'I
will give it you'--I like Inverarity Sahib--and I said, 'Can you put
your legs through the pully-wag loops by the windows? And Inverarity
Sahib said No, and laughed. I can put my legs through the pully-wag
loops. I can put my legs through these pully-wag loops. Look! Oh,
Mamma's crying again! I did n't know. I was n't not to do so."
Punch drew his legs out of the loops of the four-wheeler: the door
opened and he slid to the earth, in a cascade of parcels, at the door
of an austere little villa whose gates bore the legend "Downe Lodge."
Punch gathered himself together and eyed the house with disfavour. It
stood on a sandy road, and a cold wind tickled his knickerbockered
legs.
"Let us go away," said Punch. "This is not a pretty place."
But Mamma and Papa and Judy had quitted the cab, and all the luggage
was being taken into the house. At the door-step stood a woman in
black, and she smiled largely, with dry chapped lips. Behind her was a
man, big, bony, gray, and lame as to one leg--behind him a boy of
twelve, black-haired and oily in appearance. Punch surveyed the trio,
and advanced without fear, as he had been accustomed to do in Bombay
when callers came and he happened to be playing in the veranda.
"How do you do?" said he. "I am Punch." But they were all looking at
the luggage--all except the gray man, who shook hands with Punch and
said he was a "smart little fellow." There was much running about and
banging of boxes, and Punch curled himself up on the sofa in the
dining-room and considered things.
"I don't like these people," said Punch. "But never mind. We'll go
away soon. We have always went away soon from everywhere. I wish we
was gone back to Bombay soon."
The wish bore no fruit. For six days Mamma wept at intervals, and
showed the woman in black all Punch's clothes--a liberty which Punch
resented. "But p'raps she's a new white ayah," he thought. "I'm to
call her Antirosa, but she does n't call me Sahib. She says just
Punch," he confided to Judy. "What is Antirosa?"
Judy did n't know. Neither she nor Punch had heard anything of an
animal called an aunt. Their world had been Papa and Mamma, who knew
everything, permitted everything, and loved everybody--even Punch when
he used to go into the garden at Bombay and fill his nails with mold
after the weekly nail-cutting, because, as he explained between two
strokes of the slipper to his sorely tried Father, his fingers "felt
so new at the ends."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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