The simplicity, disingenuousness, and friendliness of the Meena are unmistakable. They are the most responsive people, and as sepoys, through contact with their British officers, they soon lose the habit of suspicion. I spent half a day with the Indian officers, and neither I nor they were bored. They like talking, and intersperse their conversation with ready and obvious jokes. It seemed to me that though they had had most of the mischief knocked out of them, they retained a good deal of their superstition and childishness. That was to be expected, but one missed the shyness and sensitiveness that generally go with superstition. They were curiously frank and communicative about their odd beliefs. Like the old Thugs they have faith in omens. The Subadar showed me the lucky and unlucky fingers, and I gathered that if the jackal howls twice on the right, one's objective in a night march is as good as gained; if thrice on the left, the stars are unpropitious, and the enterprise should be abandoned. In November, 1914, the regiment was moved to Lahore to do railway defence work. The morning the battalion left the railway station where they entrained most of the men did puja (homage) to the engine, standing with open mouths, and fingers tapping foreheads. The railway is fifty-eight miles from cantonments in Deoli, and it was the first train that many of them had seen. Until the regiment moved opinions were divided as to whether the Meenas would continue to enlist. Such an upheaval and migration had not happened since the Afghan war. Wild rumours flew round the villages, but the Commanding Officer, by a wise system of letting a few men return on leave to their homes to spread the good news that the regiment was well and happy, soon quieted the countryside. Living so far out of the world they are naturally clannish. There is as much keenness about winning a hockey match against an outside team as there is in the final for a house-cup in an English public school. And here in Mesopotamia they were full of challenge. They wanted to show what Deoli could do, but as luck would have it there was not a Turk within a hundred and fifty miles. The most delightful story I got out of the Subadar was the history of a Meena dynasty which ruled in Rajputana in the good old days before the gods became indifferent. I learnt that the proud Rajputs who claim descent from the sun and the moon are really interlopers who dispossessed the Meena by an act of treachery a hundred years ago. "Fifteen princes have been Rajputs," the Subadar told me. "Before that the Meenas were kings. The last Meena king was the sixteenth from now." "What was his name?" I asked. "Sahib, I have forgotten his name--but he was childless. One day, when he was riding out, he met a Rajput woman who carried a child unborn. 'Your son shall be the child of my heart,' he told her; and when the boy was born he brought him up, and made him commander of his horse." "Did he adopt him?"