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III. KINE SLAUGHTER.

Chet Ram, Dina Nath, and a dozen other Hindu shopkeepers of Raipur, a large village, mainly Mahomedan, on a main road and railway, present a petition to the District Magistrate that the Mahomedans of the village are slaughtering cows for food in their houses, and outraging the religious feelings of the poor Hindus. Never before, say they, have cattle been slaughtered in sacred Raipur. The faces of some are smug with satisfaction at being the first in with their petition; others ooze out excitement at once more downing the hated Mahomedans with an anti-cowkilling campaign. Ten minutes later an even greater crowd of Mahomedans-butchers, landowners, and headmen-appear with the inevitable cross-petition complaining that as little Khuda Bakhsh (Theodore, as we should say) was carrying home the evening dinner of beefsteak he was set upon by Sita Ram, who abused him and beat him till he was unconscious. (In the India of petitions no one is ever beaten without becoming unconscious.) What are poor Mahomedans to do in these days when beef alone is cheap and they have lived on beef and slaughtered cows for many generations!

Both parties are told that the cases will be decided that day week on the spot. But the week has not passed when the chief headman comes to the District Magistrate and

tells him that unless special police are sent out at once there will be a riot between Hindus and Mahomedans. So off go the District Magistrate and the Superintendent of Police each in his motor to the village. As the police have not yet been supplied with motor-lorries or any form of transport which is likely to enable them to reach riots before everything is over, they have to rattle out in antediluvian palki " carriages-square boxes broken springs dragged by pairs of angular broken-kneed ponies, which may travel six miles an hour under a constant lash, and may at any time leave the carriages behind owing to the snapping of the string repairs to the harness. Four men inside, four on the top of the roof, and another on the box

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contrary to all police regulations, but what care the police!

they form a pantomime procession. The generals arrive long before their army; but even two Englishmen are enough to stop any idea of rioting if ever there was one.

The District Magistrate has both parties up before him, and, having ascertained that cow-killing has long been customary in Raipur, orders, under a Punjab law, that the Mahomedans shall no longer slaughter in their houses, which may offend Hindus living near by, but may build a slaughterhouse outside the village, and surround it with a wall high

calculated to bring on a fit of nerves, to be communicated to the Commissioner by calls for necessary action and report."

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enough to save passing Hindus homedan outrage," carefully from the horrid sight of blood and carcasses. The leading Hindus are put on security to keep the peace. They all go off-the Mahomedans to select a site for the slaughter-house, the Hindus to arrange for the inevitable appeal to the Commissioner. The site is selected and approved as being far away from the lands and houses of the Hindus, and the enclosure wall is begun. There is no delay, as the Mahomedans want to eat beef and they cannot slaughter till the enclosure is ready. The Hindus, on the other hand, know that by using every possible delay they can cause more trouble to their opponents. So they do not lodge their appeal till the latest date allowed by law, when the wall is already reaching a man's height. They plead that passers-by on the highroad 100 yards away, and especially women going to draw water at a certain well, might have their eyes polluted with the sight of the baskets of meat going into the town.

The cunning Hindu, who sold his cow last week to a Mahomedan butcher, knows how official India never expresses outspoken condemnation of the silly and uneconomic superstition of the sacred cow, but grows nervous and whispers whenever he chooses to start a cow-killing scare. So the Hindus have been plying the central Government with telegrams about "Ma

Now it is the turn of the Commissioner to visit the village. He upholds the order requiring the Mahomedans to build a slaughter-house, but accepts the Hindus' objections to the site selected. He chooses another piece of land, which he sees is recorded in the land records as common land in the occupation of a certain Mahomedan nawab. Now the fat is in the fire. The rare event of a mistake in the land records has occurred. The site is not in the possession of the nawab, and is owned by Hindus-the Commissioner had forgotten to look up the ownership of the common land. The poor Mahomedans have spent Rs. 200 on their wall, and are now ordered to abandon that wall and start building another slaughterhouse on Hindus' land. If they venture to do as they are ordered, there is likely to be a tragedy of errors. The intervention of the big gun has not been successful. The only course open to the District Magistrate is that he should ask the Commissioner to rescind his order and accept the original settlement. But commissioners do not like their mistakes pointed out to them -even mistakes which may very easily lead to bloodshed.

MY FRIEND THE SWAN.

BY C. E. MONTAGUE.

THE war had perished beyond all hope of revival; the Genius of Famine could almost be heard stalking along the corridors of our Ministries of Coordination, Information, and Demonstration. The long howling of wolves approaching the patent swing-doors had begun to chill the young blood of the brave and the fair, upon whom war had called to warm both their hands for so long at the fire of life on those convenient premises; into the ruder lakedwellings still to be traced by the traveller crossing St James's Park a sense of the horrors of war, its worst, its post-war ones, was making its way. Thus may poor Pharaoh have felt in his dream when the seven lean and ill-favoured kine,

such as I never saw in all the land of Egypt for badness," came up after the seven fat kine and ate them without bulging.

Under this bludgeon stroke of fate no head that I know was more intrepidly unbowed than that which bore on its obverse side the comely and imperturbable face of Colin March. He was now twentyfive. A letter of his found me stuck at the Domhof, Cologne, the Christmas after the glorious and fatal 11th of November. Colin had written on War Office paper, the War Office

being just then his strategic base and the seat of his government over circumstance. He had also, somewhat regally, popped his letter into the King's Messenger's bag, distrusting the speed of the common post of our armies.

From his War Office he wrote, "I sit within this frowning pile, and I frown worse than it." Then I knew his spirits were high. He went on,

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Let me have war, say I,' as my friend Shakspeare says: 'It's sprightly, waking, audible, and full of vent. Then I felt pretty sure that he was as glad the whistle had blown as any old infantry colonel who wanted no more of his men to be chipped. He went on to mention a dear friend of ours, Claude Barbason. Being a Regular, Claude would have to collapse after the war"like other sausage balloons," Colin vulgarly wrote-from the size of a Brigadier-General to that of a mere common Captain. Still,' Colin wrote,

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my mind is easy about him. As long as there's any sort of Q side up above, as our friend the Bard says, that 'providently caters for the sparrow,' Claude's rations are safe."

"Hullo!" I thought, "good deal of Shakspeare lying about ! " And again, a few lines lower down, I read,

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tian's building material. But organisation was needed-the "big business " touch. No Geddes or Selfridge had come in as yet to lead the parched horse of Demand to the abounding waters of Supply and make him drink there at a reasonable tariff. A few poor shabby old tags-"The play's the thing,' "Put money in thy purse,

"What says the downy old steal a load of Titus' or DomiSwan of Avon about it? followed by some queer quotation. Strange! Saul had come off as one of the saints. But Colin one of the pedants! No! He must have got a new game on. He must be writing like this, playing the ripe Shakspearean, to make me prick up my ears, before he let on. That would be quite in his line. He had fished in his time; he knew how to use ground bait.

Yes, it was a game-a beginning, as Colin said when I came home in May, of the reconstruction of Europe. It all came of a tip that had come indirectly to Colin from one who could not be wrong if the British Constitution is right. Colin's father, the old ambassador, had been there when King Edward met, at a dinner, the greatest of all the Shakspearean pundits. "Stick to Shakspeare, Mr Bowles," the prudent sovereign had said to the freely perspiring student; there's money in him." Colin had, as Columbia says, figured on this. All sorts and conditions of men, he reflected, were would-be consumers of Shakspeare. All tried to quote him. Teacher and preacher and politician and trader-all of them wedged in a bit of his stuff, if they could, among their own drivel. Rightly seen, the plays were a quarry-only better; all the stone was ready cut. They were what the Colosseum had been when any jerry-builder in Rome could still go in and

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VOL. COXI.-NO. MCCLXXVIII.

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To thine own self be true," and so on-were about all that the private consumer could put his hand on. Why, it was as if we were still only scraping a few shaley scuttles of coal, with a shovel, off the surface of Northumberland. Colin figured hard. Then he acted.UI

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You will recall how in that summer of 1919 the fruits of what looked like a richer national culture began to load and bless our advertisement hoardings. Foker's Prime London Ales were, for the first time, recommended to us on those engaging "three-column blocks" of Autolycus singing 'A quart of ale is a dish for a king." In extenuation of that mortal sin against the honour of the vine, the Golden Tagus New Australian Port, the preference of Mr Justice Silence for "A cup of wine that's brisk and fine" was cited, with ingenious effrontery, a few weeks later. "Let me have men about me that are fat" (Froud's Fast Filling Breakfast Food), and "Not china dishes, but very good dishes" (Wild's War Saving Dinner Stoneware) were

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other works of Colin's first period. Like many other artists he was to have three periods. Somebody said that these early strivings of his first period made the wall of a Tube station look as if an ounce of the stuff that excites ginger-beer had been thrown into a large puddle : a patch, here and there, of the puddle capered and frisked feebly. That was how Colin, the ex-Service man, began to feel his way back into the ranks of civil industry.

First he had made out a list of those wise traders who advertise most. This took him the last two months of his war service. From out the unsuspecting herd, catalogued in this way, he would next mark down for the chase some veritable stag of ten, like the eponymous owner of Sprot's Spermaceti Rupture Cure. Then he would steal seductively up on the creature, holding out in his hand, as it were, a sealed packet and praising its unstated contents. Was that particular quarry aware, he would ask, that our national poet had written as if he had never had a thought in his mind except to assist in advertising the quarry's business Then, while the hunted thing stood spellbound, moveless as a tickled trout, Colin would swiftly explain that the Shakspeare Publicity Trust had the goods, that the fee was-for goods that were goodness itself

-a mere bagatelle and if any client would simply say he was disappointed the Trust

would refund. What could be fairer ?

The bargain once struck, Colin would bring out his pearl. To Sprot, the Spermaceti Rupture Curer, he would present the prescription cited by Hotspur:

"The sovereign'st thing on earth Was parmaceti for an inward bruise."

For Messrs Starr of Dundee, the spirited authors of that cheap and unstable adhesive, North Star Gum, he would have ready the testimonial of Julius Cæsar :

"constant as the Northern Star, Of whose true-fixed and resting quality There is no fellow in the firmament."

You, a person of fastidious taste, may not think highly of these sallies. Nor, I suppose, would you think much of a Red Palmer fly for your luncheon. But that is only because you are no trout. And if you were a Sprot or a Starr you would know the makings of a good puff when you saw them. Colin knew the element he worked in. slipped up once," he said. Remember the Tempest' ? -how our poor aboriginal friend said that the white settler used to pet him at first

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gave him water with berries in't'? Wouldn't you say that was simply written for Jellaby's Genuine Juniper Gin "

No! I wouldn't. Nor would Colin. His eyes twinkled demurely. I saw that he had been tempering business with mischief. I let him run on,

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