Published: Civil and Military Gazette, 11 January 1888.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 4 (28/4, p. 43).

Text: Civil and Military Gazette.

Notes: There is no reason to suppose that this is anything other than fiction, but in this month RK was travelling (hence the pseudonym ‘The Traveller’) all over India on assignment from the Pioneer and writing the sketches collected as ‘Letters of Marque’. In the course of his travels, as he wrote to his cousin Margaret Burne-Jones, ‘I saw and heard all sorts and conditions of men and they told me the story of their lives, black and white and brown alike, and I filled three note books’ (25 January–24 March 1888: Letters, i, 151). The germ of ‘Mister Antony Dawking’ may have come from such encounters.

Reprinted in ‘Turnovers’, i, May 1888; in the suppressed City of Dreadful Night, 1890; in the Martindell–Ballard pamphlets; in the Civil and Military Gazette Annual, 1936, in Harbord, iv, 1958–61, and in Charles Allen, Kipling's Kingdom, London, 1987.

“When I comes to a gentleman and says, ‘Look here! you give me a drink,’ and that gentleman says, ‘No I won't neither; you've ‘ad too much,’ am I angry? No! What I sez is”….

At this point, without word or warning, he went deeply and peacefully to sleep in the long-chair in the verandah. The dak-bungalow khansamah eyed him fearfully from afar. “He has come again,” said the dak-bungalow khansamah, “and God knows when he will depart. I must get dinner.” Towards dusk, Mister Anthony Dawking woke up and demanded refreshment. “The last time I was ‘ere,” said he pensively, “that there khansammah ‘e ran away down the road and wouldn't give me no khana. So I took a leg of the bed and I broke open the cook-’ ouse and I made my own khana. And now ‘e don't run away no more. Hitherow tum! Just you khana lao and I'll have the same whiskey as I had last time.” While the khansamah was preparing the meal, I turned over the pages of the dak-bungalow book. They fairly bristled with the name of “Anthony Dawking,” and opposite each entry were that gentleman's comments on his entertainment.