Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, English
"Who are you?" he said, with a laugh.
"I am the Dimbula, of course. I've never been anything else
except that - and a fool!"
The tugboat, which was doing its very best to be run down, got
away just in time; its band playing clashily and brassily a
popular but impolite air:
In the days of old Rameses - are you on?In the days of old
Rameses - are you on?In the days of old Rameses,That story had
paresis,Are you on - are you on - are you on?
"Well, I'm glad you've found yourself," said the Steam. "To tell
the truth, I was a little tired of talking to all those ribs and
stringers. Here's Quarantine. After that we'll go to our wharf
and clean up a little, and - next month we'll do it all over
again."
END OF THE "THE SHIP THAT FOUND HERSELF"
THE TOMB OF HIS ANCESTORS
Some people will tell you that if there were but a single loaf of
bread in all India it would be divided equally between the
Plowdens, the Trevors, the Beadons, and the Rivett-Carnacs. That
is only one way of saying that certain families serve India
generation after generation, as dolphins follow in line across
the open sea.
Let us take a small and obscure case. There has been at least one
representative of the Devonshire Chinns in or near Central India
since the days of Lieutenant-Fireworker Humphrey Chinn, of the
Bombay European Regiment, who assisted at the capture of
Seringapatam in 1799. Alfred Ellis Chinn, Humphrey's younger
brother, commanded a regiment of Bombay grenadiers from 1804 to
1813, when he saw some mixed fighting; and in 1834 John Chinn of
the same family - we will call him John Chinn the First - came to
light as a level-headed administrator in time of trouble at a
place called Mundesur. He died young, but left his mark on the
new country, and the Honourable the Board of Directors of the
Honourable the East India Company embodied his virtues in a
stately resolution, and paid for the expenses of his tomb among
the Satpura hills.
He was succeeded by his son, Lionel Chinn, who left the little
old Devonshire home just in time to be severely wounded in the
Mutiny. He spent his working life within a hundred and fifty
miles of John Chinn's grave, and rose to the command of a
regiment of small, wild hill-men, most of whom had known his
father. His son John was born in the small thatched-roofed,
mud-walled cantonment, which is even to-day eighty miles from
the nearest railway, in the heart of a scrubby, tigerish
country. Colonel Lionel Chinn served thirty years and retired.
In the Canal his steamer passed the outward-bound troop-ship,
carrying his son eastward to the family duty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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