I could have told him all that yeears ago . I think Hurree Babu is getting too old for the Road . He likes better to collect manners and customs information . Yes , he wants to be an FRS . ` Hurree thinks well of the boy , does n't he ? ' ` Oh , very indeed -- we have had some pleasant evenings at my little place -- but I think it would be waste to throw him away with Hurree on the Ethnological side . ' ` Not for a first experience . How does that strike you , Mahbub ? Let the boy run with the lama for six months . After that we can see . He will get experience . ' ` He has it already , Sahib -- as a fish controls the water he swims in . But for every reason it will be well to loose him from the school . ' ` Very good , then , ' said Creighton , half to himself . ` He can go with the lama , and if Hurree Babu cares to keep an eye on them so much the better . He wo n't lead the boy into any danger as Mahbub would . Curious -- his wish to be an F R S. Very human , too . He is best on the Ethnological side -- Hurree . ' No money and no preferment would have drawn Creighton from his work on the Indian Survey , but deep in his heart also lay the ambition to write ' F R S ' after his name . Honours of a sort he knew could be obtained by ingenuity and the help of friends , but , to the best of his belief , nothing save work -- papers representing a life of it -- took a man into the Society which he had bombarded for years with monographs on strange Asiatic cults and unknown customs .
Nine men out of ten would flee from a Royal Society soiree in extremity of boredom ; but XXXXX was the tenth , and at times his soul yearned for the crowded rooms in easy London where silver-haired , bald-headed gentlemen who know nothing of the Army move among spectroscopic experiments , the lesser plants of the frozen tundras , electric flight-measuring machines , and apparatus for slicing into fractional millimetres the left eye of the female mosquito .
Babu Creighton Ethnological FRS Honours Mahbub Survey first years yeears