Published: Civil and Military Gazette, 19 May 1888.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 4 (28/4, pp. 64–5).

Text: Civil and Military Gazette.

Notes: In a letter dated a few days after this piece, RK wrote that ‘The heat here is maddening and gets worse at night. In the day one can force oneself into work and not notice it but in the night there is no such relief and so one kicks and knocks about “till the day break”’ (to Mrs Hill, [25–27] 1888: Letters, i, 194). The title is from the Song of Solomon 2:16. ‘Till the Day Break’ has been reprinted in Kipling's India: Uncollected Sketches, 1986.

The Brain-fever bird had a secret to tell since the earliest morning. “I'll tell you what,” said he confidentially. “I'll tell you what.” But he never never told. Now he has gone to bed, taking the secret with him, and the little owls have come out to play bo-peep among the bougainvilleas and chuckle over the folly of the Brain-fever Bird.

Does an owl feel the heat? How can an owl hang head downward for five minutes and talk politics to a neighbour at the same time. If an owl were to lose his balance….

But the business of the night is to sleep. Once upon a time, there were one thousand sheep who came to a nullah, and the bell-wether jumped, and the second sheep jumped, and the third sheep jumped, and the fourth and the fifth and the sixth…. Whose cartwheels are those? Some man coming back from a dinner somewhere. Is it a two-wheeled cart or a four-wheeled? If the first, it may be Bathershin's– if the second, Nixey's. But did Nixey send his cart to be repaired, or was it Nixey's mare or Bathershin's mare that cut her hock upon the splash-board? It was a beast with two white stockings– no, one, and a blaze on the nose. Or two. But which was it? A stocking and a blaze, or two white stockings and without a blaze?