he rushed head down at the fat stomach of the chief priest, bowled him over, and treating the rest as he would have treated a crush at football, found himself, with Chris at his heels, on the top of the steps almost before the crowd had realised what was happening. 'Pull up, sir,' he said, pausing breathlessly; 'never run a hinch more nor you can 'elp with niggers. An' they'll be all right now we're off them steps. I know 'em! As peaceable a lot as ever lived, if you don't touch their wimmin or their gods.' And with that he turned to the peaceable lot with his usual urbanity. '_Ram-ram_, gents. I done you no 'arm, and you done me no 'arm. That's as it should be. So good afternoon. _Salaam alackoom!_--Now then, sir, you come along to my diggin's an' get your pants.' But as they hurried off to the Strangers' Home, he shook his head gravely. 'If it hadn't bin for my bein' in a surplus chore seven year, and so knowin' "Lord a' mercy" to the Ten Commandments, and my dooty to my neighbour, you'd never a wore breeches agin, sir, for I wouldn't never ave come back to them steps with a prick in my conshinse, sir, for fear as there was more in them dress pants than meets the eye, as the sayin' is; though why the nation, savin' your presence, sir, you come to took 'em off, beats me!' Chris told him. Told him the whole story, as he might not, perhaps, have told a better man, and John Ellison listened decorously, respectfully. It was not till Chris, attired in the fateful garments, with his subordinate's white uniform coat superadded and the devotee's shawl twined as a turban (since it had not been deemed feasible to recover the rest of the dress-suit that night), was ready to return to civilisation, that John Ellison ventured on a parting remark. 'It's the onsartainty, sir, that does the mischief. Beer's beer, an' whisky's whisky. It's when you come to mixin' 'em that you dun'no where you are. It taste beastly to begin with, and then it don't make a chap, so to speak, punctooal drunk. So it throws 'im out o' reckonin', and makes 'im onsartin--an' that don't work in "Hinjia's coral strand."' CHAPTER IX UNCERTAINTIES There were many people in many parts of Nushapore that Sunday evening who were echoing Jân-Ali-shân's estimate of the danger and discomforts of uncertainty. For, far and near, from Government House, where Grace Arbuthnot sate at the head of a glittering dinner-table round which half the empire-making bureaucracy of the province was gathered, to the veriest hovel on the outcast outskirts of the city, where two women--the lowest of the low--were grinding at the mill for their daily bread such sweepings of the corn-dealers' shops as they had been able to gather during the day, the feeling that none knew what the coming dawn might bring to hovel and house, home and country, and people, lay heavily, almost suffocatingly.