I am sorry you can not beat my boy this morning . He says he will kill you with a knife or poison . He is jealous , so I have put him in the corner and I shall not speak to him today . He has just tried to kill me . You must help me with the breakfast . He is almost too jealous to trust , just now . ' Now a genuine imported Sahib from England would have made a great to-do over this tale . Lurgan Sahib stated it as simply as Mahbub Ali was used to record his little affairs in the North . The back veranda of the shop was built out over the sheer hillside , and they looked down into their neighbours ' chimney-pots , as is the custom of Simla . But even more than the purely Persian meal cooked by Lurgan Sahib with his own hands , the shop fascinated Kim . The Lahore Museum was larger , but here were more wonders -- ghost-daggers and prayer-wheels from Tibet ; turquoise and raw amber necklaces ; green jade bangles ; curiously packed incense-sticks in jars crusted over with raw garnets ; the devil-masks of overnight and a wall full of peacock-blue draperies ; gilt figures of Buddha , and little portable lacquer altars ; Russian samovars with turquoises on the lid ; egg-shell china sets in quaint octagonal cane boxes ; yellow ivory crucifixes -- from Japan of all places in the world , so Lurgan Sahib said ; carpets in dusty bales , smelling atrociously , pushed back behind torn and rotten screens of geometrical work ; Persian water-jugs for the hands after meals ; dull copper incense-burners neither Chinese nor Persian , with friezes of fantastic devils running round them ; tarnished silver belts that knotted like raw hide ; hairpins of jade , ivory , and plasma ; arms of all sorts and kinds , and a thousand other oddments were cased , or piled , or merely thrown into the room , leaving a clear space only round the rickety deal table , where Lurgan Sahib worked . ` Those things are nothing , ' said his host , following Kim 's glance . ' I buy them because they are pretty , and sometimes I sell -- if I like the buyer 's look . My work is on the table -- some of it . ' It blazed in the morning light -- all red and blue and green flashes , picked out with the vicious blue-white spurt of a diamond here and there . Kim opened his eyes . ` Oh , they are quite well , those stones . It will not hurt them to take the sun . Besides , they are cheap . But with sick stones it is very different . '
He XXXXX Kim 's plate anew .
fascinated hide like looked picked piled put running tarnished thrown