They were sons of subordinate officials in the Railway, Telegraph, and Canal services; of warrant-officers, sometimes retired and sometimes acting as commanders-in-chief of a feudatory Rajah's army; of captains of the Indian Marine, Government pensioners, planters, presidency shopkeepers, and missionaries; a few were cadets of the old Eurasian houses that have taken strong root in Dhurrumtollah—Pereiras, De Souzas, and De Silvas. Their parents could well have educated them in England, but they loved the school that had served their own youth, and generation followed sallow-hued generation at St. Xavier's. Their homes ranged from Howrah of the railway people to abandoned cantonments like Monghyr and Chunar;lost tea-gardens Shillong way; villages where their fathers were large landholders in Oudh or the Deccan; mission stations a week from the nearest railway line; seaports a thousand miles south, facing the shallow Indian surf; and cinchona plantations south of all. The mere story of their adventures, which to them were no adventures, on their road to and from school would have crisped an English boy's hair. They were used to jogging off alone through a hundred miles of jungle, where there was always the delightful chance of being delayed by tigers; but they would no more have bathed in the English Channel in an English August, than their brothers across the world would have lain still while a leopard snuffed at their palanquin. There were boys of fifteen who had spent a day and a half on an islet in the middle of a flooded river, taking charge, as by right, of a camp of frantic pilgrims returning from a shrine; there were seniors who had requisitioned a chance-met Rajah's elephant, in the name of St. Francis Xavier, when the rains once blotted out the cart track that led to their father's estate, and had all but lost the huge beast in a quicksand. There was a boy who, he
