Published: Civil and Military Gazette, 4 June 1888.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 4 (28/4, p. 68).

Text: Civil and Military Gazette.

Notes: The celebration of Queen Victoria's jubilee in 1887 had generated a stream of decorations of far greater volume than usual, yet the demand for honors did not cease. In a letter of 27 June, a few weeks after ‘The Fountain of Honour’, RK reports the viceroy, Lord Dufferin, as follows:

He has just made a discovery – or pretends that he has – and tells the tale (with a somber twinkle in the one eye that he can see out of) as one who is genuinely pained and astonished. ‘Do you know,’ says H[is] E[xcellency], ‘that there are gentlemen – Indian Civilians – who write – ah yes – write to me suggesting – ah yes – asking that they should be decorated because they have done the state some service.’ Then he paused and went on gravely ‘And quite the hardest part of my official labours is replying to those letters,’ (Letters, i, 217)

‘The Fountain of Honour’ has been reprinted in the Martindell–Ballard pamphlets and in Harbord, iv, 2057–60.

They were sitting upon the “mossy banks of Jakko”, – rows and rows of them – and they drummed with their heels on the mould while they sang softly to the tune of the lawyer's song in Trial by Jury:–

Then they wept on each other's necks copiously, and the little monkeys in the pine branches said:– “How interesting!” Far, far down the slopes towards the Church the children of the Kindergarten were practising their innocent songs to sing before the Inspector; and the shrill childish treble floated up on the breeze:–

“Ugh!” grunted the Chorus of the Disappointed. “If they only knew how they were hurting us.” “Is there no chance?” murmured one more heart-broken than the rest. “No,” was the dejected reply. “They've turned off the gas at the meter. Don't you recollect?