His Chance in Life by Rudyard Kipling — Read

Then a pile of heads be laid -- / Thirty thousand heaped on high -- / All to please the Kafir maid, / Where the Oxus ripples by. / Grimly spake Atulla Khan: -- / "Love hath made this thing a Man. " / Oatta's Story.

If you go straight away from Levees and Government House Lists, past Trades' Balls -- far beyond everything and everybody you ever knew in your respectable life -- you cross, in time, the Border line where the last drop of White blood ends and the full tide of Black sets in. It would be easier to talk to a new made Duchess on the spur of the moment than to the Borderline folk without violating some of their conventions or hurting their feelings. The Black and the White mix very quaintly in their ways. Sometimes the White shows in spurts of fierce, childish pride -- which is Pride of Race run crooked -- and sometimes the Black in still fiercer abasement and humility, half heathenish customs and strange, unaccountable impulses to crime. One of these days, this people -- understand they are far lower than the class whence Derozio, the man who imitated Byron, sprung -- will turn out a writer or a poet; and then we shall know how they live and what they feel. In the meantime, any stories about them cannot be absolutely correct in fact or inference.