the sepoys had become like the tiger-folk.  Then she picked up Sonny Sahib and held him tighter than he liked.  She had crooned with patient smiles over many of the babalok in her day, but from beginning to end, never a baba like this.  So strong he was, he could make old Abdul cry out, pulling at his beard, so sweet-tempered and healthy that he would sleep just where he was put down, like other babies of Rubbulgurh.  Tooni grieved deeply that she could not give him a bottle, and a coral, and a perambulator, and often wondered that he consented to thrive without these things, but the fact remains that he did.  He even allowed himself to be oiled all over occasionally for the good of his health, which was forbearing in a British baby.  And always when Abdul shook his finger at him and said—­

’Gorah pah howdah, hathi pah Jeen! 
Jeldi bag-gia, Warren HasTEEN!’[1]

he laughed and crowed as if he quite understood the joke.

[1] ’Howdahs on horses, on elephants Jeen!  He ran away quickly did Warren HasTEEN!’

‘Jeen’ means ‘saddles,’ but nobody could make that rhyme!  Popular incident of an English retreat in Hastings’ time.

Tooni had no children of her own, and wondered how long it would be before she and Abdul must go again to Cawnpore to find the baby’s father.  There need be no hurry, Tooni thought, as Sonny Sahib played with the big silver hoops in her ears, and tried to kick himself over her shoulder.  Abdul calculated the number of rupees that would be a suitable reward for taking care of a baby for six months, found it considerable, and said they ought to start at once.  Then other news came—­gathering terror from mouth to mouth as it crossed Rajputana—­and Abdul told his wife one evening, after she had put Sonny Sahib to sleep with a hymn to Israfil, that a million of English soldiers had come upon Cawnpore, and in their hundredfold revenge had left neither Mussulman nor Hindoo alive in the city—­also that the Great Lord Sahib had ordered the head of every kala admi, every black man, to be taken to build a bridge across the Ganges with, so that hereafter his people might leave Cawnpore by another way.  Then Abdul also became of the opinion that there need be no haste in going.

Sonny Sahib grew out of the arms and necks of his long embroidered night dresses and day dresses almost immediately, and then there was a difficulty, which Tooni surmounted by cutting the waists off entirely and gathering the skirts round the baby’s neck with a drawing string, making holes in the sides for his arms to come through.  Tooni bought him herself a little blue and gold Mussulman cap in the bazar.  The captain-sahib would be angry, but then the captain-sahib was very far away, killed perhaps, and Tooni thought the blue and gold cap wonderfully becoming to Sonny Sahib.  All day long he played and crept in this under the sacred peepul-tree in the middle of the village among brown-skinned babies who wore no clothes at all—­only a string of beads round their fat little waists—­and who sometimes sat down in silence and made a solemn effort to comprehend him.