The Kipling Reader: Selections from the Books of Rudyard KiplingKipling, Rudyard
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The Kipling Reader: Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling
Kipling, Rudyard
Animals -- Fiction; English poetry; India -- Social life and customs -- Literary collections; Readers; Short stories, English
'Call up your beast,' said the planter, and Deesa shouted in the
mysterious elephant-language, that some mahouts believe came from
China at the birth of the world, when elephants and not men were
masters. Moti Guj heard and came. Elephants do not gallop. They move
from spots at varying rates of speed. If an elephant wished to catch
an express train he could not gallop, but he could catch the train.
Thus Moti Guj was at the planter's door almost before Chihun noticed
that he had left his pickets. He fell into Deesa's arms trumpeting
with joy, and the man and beast wept and slobbered over each other,
and handled each other from head to heel to see that no harm had
befallen.
'Now we will get to work,' said Deesa. 'Lift me up, my son and my
joy.'
Moti Guj swung him up and the two went to the coffee-clearing to look
for irksome stumps.
The planter was too astonished to be very angry.
POETRY
THE NATIVE-BORN
_We've drunk to the Queen--God bless her!--
We've drunk, to our mothers' land;
We've drunk to our English brother
(But he does not understand);
We've drunk to the wide creation,
And the Cross swings low for the morn;
Last toast, and of obligation,
A health to the Native-born!
They change their skies above them,
But not their hearts that roam!
We learned from our wistful mothers
To call old England 'home';
We read of the English skylark,
Of the spring in the English lanes,
But we screamed with the painted lories
As we rode on the dusty plains!
They passed with their old-world legends--
Their tales of wrong and dearth--
Our fathers held by purchase,
But we by the right of birth;
Our heart's where they rocked our cradle,
Our love where we spent our toil,
And our faith and our hope and our honour
We pledge, to our native soil!
I charge you charge your glasses--
I charge you drink with me
To the men of the Four New Nations,
And the Islands of the Sea--
To the last least lump of coral
That none may stand outside,
And our own good pride shall teach us
To praise our comrade's pride!_
To the hush of the breathless morning
Oh the thin, tin, crackling roofs,
To the haze of the burned back-ranges
And the dust of the shoeless hoofs--
To the risk of a death by drowning,
To the risk of a death by drouth--
To the men of a million acres,
To the Sons of the Golden South!
_To the Sons of the Golden South (Stand up!),
And the life we live and know,
Let a fellow sing o' the little things he cares about,
If a fellow fights for the little things he cares about
With the weight of a single blow!_
To the smoke of a hundred coasters,
To the sheep on a thousand hills,
To the sun that never blisters,
To the rain that never chills--
To the land of the waiting spring-time,
To our five-meal, meat-fed men,
To the tall, deep-bosomed women,
And the children nine and ten!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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