Kim by Rudyard Kipling — Read

Your tiercel's too long at hack, Sire. He's no eyass / But a passage-hawk that footed ere we caught him, / Dangerously free o' the air. Faith! were he mine / (As mine's the glove he binds to for his tirings) / I'd fly him with a make-hawk. He's in yarak / Plumed to the very point -- so manned, so weathered. / Give him the firmament God made him for, / And what shall take the air of him? / Gow's Watch

Lurgan Sahib did not use as direct speech, but his advice tallied with Mahbub's; and the upshot was good for Kim. He knew better now than to leave Lucknow city in native garb, and if Mahbub were anywhere within reach of a letter, it was to Mahbub's camp he headed, and made his change under the Pathan's wary eye. Could the little Survey paintbox that he used for map-tinting in term-time have found a tongue to tell of holiday doings, he might have been expelled. Once Mahbub and he went together as far as the beautiful city of Bombay, with three truckloads of tram-horses, and Mahbub nearly melted when Kim proposed a sail in a dhow across the Indian Ocean to buy Gulf Arabs, which, he understood from a hanger-on of the dealer Abdul Rahman, fetched better prices than mere Kabulis.