Explore "A Bird of Passage" by B.M. Croker on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"Love, whose month is ever May, / Spied a blossom passing fair." / Much Ado About Nothing.
"ANOTHER fine, sunshiny day," is naturally of common recurrence in the East, and it was yet another magnificent afternoon at Ross-very bright, very warm, and very still. Underneath the long wooden pier vast shoals of little silver sardines were hurrying through the water, pursued by a greedy dolphin, and leaping now and then in a glittering shower into the air to escape his voracious jaws. Coal-black, stunted Andamanese were here and there squatting on the rocks, patiently angling with the most primitive of tackle, and two or three policemen, in roomy blue tunics and portentous turbans, were gossiping together about rupees and rice. Some half-dozen soldiers, with open coats and pipe in mouth, sat, with their legs dangling over the pier, fishing. Further on, with folded arms, and wistful eyes, a tall gaunt Bengalee stood, aloof and alone. He was a zemindar from Oude, and had been in the settlement since 1858 (an ominous date); now he was the holder of a ticket, was free to open a shop in the bazaar, and make a rapid fortune; free to accept a plot of the most fertile ground on the face of the globe, free to marry a convict woman, free within the settlement, but there his liberty ended. His body is imprisoned, but who can chain the mind? His is far away beyond those dim, blue islands, and the shining "Kala Panee!" In imagination he now stands, not upon Ross pier, but on wide-stretching plains far north; his horizon is bounded by magnificent forest trees, and topes of fragrant mangoes: once more he sees his native village, and the familiar well, his plot of land, his home; just as he saw it twenty years ago. But too well does he remember every inmate of those small, white-washed hovels; their faces are before him now-for, alas! what has been left to _him_ but memory? Bitterly has he expiated those few frenzied weeks, when for a brief space, he and his neighbours felt that they had broken the accursed yoke, and trampled it beneath their feet-bitterer, ten times, is it to know that he was sold and betrayed by his own familiar friend!