Like Steve Paustian Gunga Din is the only Kipling poem I ever took by heart-
as a (Coronation) party piece as a 7yr old in June 1953.
My earliest copy of Barrack Room Ballads is a german copyright edition of
1892(Heinemann and Balestier, Leipzig). This also gives "slippery" without
any italics. I assume the revision later was in the interests of scansion,to
give seven syllables to each line of the couplet(not knowing any Hindi I am
presuming that "hitherao" carries three syllables).
Brian Payne
Norwich
UK
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