PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS (40+ Short Stories in One Edition). Rudyard Kipling

      Lispeth

       Table of Contents

      Look, you have cast out Love! What Gods are these

       You bid me please?

       The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so!

       To my own Gods I go.

       It may be they shall give me greater ease

       Than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.

       —The Convert.

      She was the daughter of Sonoo, a Hill-man, and Jadeh his wife. One year their maize failed, and two bears spent the night in their only poppy-field just above the Sutlej Valley on the Kotgarh side; so, next season, they turned Christian, and brought their baby to the Mission to be baptized. The Kotgarh Chaplain christened her Elizabeth, and "Lispeth" is the Hill or pahari pronunciation.

      Later, cholera came into the Kotgarh Valley and carried off Sonoo and Jadeh, and Lispeth became half-servant, half-companion to the wife of the then Chaplain of Kotgarh. This was after the reign of the Moravian missionaries, but before Kotgarh had quite forgotten her title of "Mistress of the Northern Hills."

      Whether Christianity improved Lispeth, or whether the gods of her own people would have done as