Something of Myself by Rudyard Kipling — Read

I am poor Brother Lippo by your leave. / You need not clap your torches to my face. / -Fra Lippo Lippi.

So, at sixteen years and nine months, but looking four or five years older, and adorned with real whiskers which the scandalised Mother abolished within one hour of beholding, I found myself at Bombay where I was born, moving among sights and smells that made me deliver in the vernacular sentences whose meaning I knew not. Other Indian-born boys have told me how the same thing happened to them.