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An Arab once asked Abu’l Aina to give him his ring, so that he might have something to remember him by. Abu’l Aina replied: ‘You can remember that you asked me for it and I refused.’

King Crocodile.

A day or two later I noticed a curious increase on a rock in the river. I looked again, and saw that a
great crocodile lay basking1 upon its summit! I had seen crocodiles before, but this old fellow was a king of crocodiles, He lay flat and clingingly, his short arms and webbed feet clasping the rock beneath him. He was not red like the smaller crocodiles, but green; and I supposed that this was due to a growth of aquatic weeds upon his iron hide. I took my camera from its case and began to open it; but some instinct of being watched took hold upon him, and suddenly he stood up. I felt my hair tickle on the back of my head. I never knew that crocodiles could stand. I had always thought they merely floundered on their bellies. But, believe me, this crocodile stood up. I put down my camera hastily, and sent a bullet thudding into his massive flank, and with that he plunged into the water. We never saw him again.

I am a Hindu by birth, and I mean no disrespect to any other religion when I say that I would not change my faith for all the possessions of this world or of any other. But I should be a false Hindu, and I should deserve less to be called a Brahman, if I desired that Hindus or Brahmans should have any unfair advantage as such over Mahomedans, Christians, or any other community in India. How ennobling it is even to think of that high ideal of patriotism where Hindus, Mahomedans, Parsis and Christians, stand shoulder to shoulder as brothers and work for the common good of all. I invite my brethren to respond to this higher call, and to feel that we cannot in separation build up a material life worth having, but that we must rise or fall together.

One day a young prince was out practising archery with the son of his father’s chief vizier, when one of the arrows accidentally struck the wife of a merchant, who was walking about in an upper room of a house close by. The prince had aimed at a bird that was perched on the window-sill of that room, and had not the slightest idea that anybody was at hand, or he would not have shot in that direction. Consequently, not knowing what had happened, he and the vizier’s son walked away, the vizier’s son chaffing him because he had missed the bird.

A clerk in the Bank of England was surprised with the announcement of a five hundred pound legacy left him by a person whose name he was a stranger to. It seems that in his daily morning walks from his home to his office it had been his practice for twenty years to drop a halfpenny into the hat of a blind beggar who sat by the wayside. The good old beggar recognised his daily benefactor by the voice only; and, when he died, left all his savings to his old Bank friend.