'
Noble work that was to do, and nobly you have done it; and I do not
wonder that to a man who has been set to such a task, and given power
to carry it through, all smaller work must seem paltry; that such a
man's very amusements, in that grand Indian land, and that free
adventurous Indian life, exciting the imagination, calling out all
the self-help and daring of a man, should have been on a par with
your work; that when you go a sporting, you ask for no meaner
preserve than the primaeval forest, no lower park wall than the snow-
peaks of the Himalaya.
Yes; you have been a 'burra Shikarree' as well as a 'burra Sahib.'
You have played the great game in your work, and killed the great
game in your play. How many tons of mighty monsters have you done to
death, since we two were schoolboys together, five-and-twenty years
ago? How many starving villages have you fed with the flesh of
elephant or buffalo? How many have you delivered from man-eating
tigers, or wary old alligators, their craws full of poor girls'
bangles? Have you not been charged by rhinoceroses, all but ript up
by boars? Have you not seen face to face Ovis Ammon himself, the
giant mountain sheep--primaeval ancestor, perhaps, of all the flocks
on earth? Your memories must be like those of Theseus and Hercules,
full of slain monsters.
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