my portion for five strenuous years, until the everlasting plough-land had become a weariness to the eye and the rare patches of fallow as welcome as oases in a desert. Besides this, to the District officer in India wheat spells work, for over the wheat-lands men wrangle for ever and ever, and where the King's subjects have most to fight about, there is the scantiest leisure for the King's servants who administer the law. But the longdelayed retirement of an elderly "D. I. G." had sent a ripple of transfers from end to end of the Province. Carried on the crest of that wave, I had passed from a tract where young India rode upon a bicycle and drank lemonade from an aluminum mug, to a District two-thirds of which was under virgin forest, where real bread made out of wheat was often hard to come by, and the problem of keeping the roads clear of man-eating tigers had reduced my predecessor in office to a morbid condition of felicidal monomania. On that divine morning I had already ridden for three hours without passing a single human habitation or a ploughed field, and the novelty of this experience inspired in me an immoral satisfaction. For though to be idle on a holiday is torment, to ride on duty with no work to do, no liquor-shops or police-outposts to inspect on the way, is as sweet as stolen apples, and as rare, in these days of "Efficiency," as a fat District officer.

Therefore I was in no manner of haste to arrive at Ahrora, my journey's end. The village is the capital of an unpopular subdivision, three days' march from headquarters. On this, the third day out, I had originally intended to reach the tents before eleven o'clock, in good time for breakfast. But the joy of loitering was too delicious to forego. The magic of the morning had laid hold on me, and the beauty of the world was past all tell

ing. We were climbing, my mare and I, through a pass in the hills which curve round the plain of Ahrora like tiers of seats in an amphitheatre. To our right was a wall of rock, but on the left of the track the hillside fell away in slopes and precipices down to a vast gulf of misty jungle, on the far side of which forest heaped upon forest rose in enormous banks to the sky-line. Green and brown and gold were the colors of the jungle, with here and there the scarlet of an earlyblossoming Palas tree. The track itself was studded with star-like flowers as blue as English forget-me-nots, and with every breath one inhaled the piercing scent of wild thyme. A cairn gay with little red and white flags marked the summit of the pass. This I duly hailed as the altar of Debiof-the-stone-heap, the guardian goddess of anxious travellers, and certainly her office here was no sinecure. For the road is perhaps the most notorious in the Province, and Debi, assisted by the forest officer with a pound of strychnine, had only recently succeeded in settling accounts with a pair of stealthy striped man-hunters, which had discovered that the Government mail-runners crossed the path daily with pleasing punctuality. Before the descent was finished I was reminded of this incident by the pug-marks of a tigress and two cubs which had preceded me in the early hours, before the ground had dried. Where the path was broken by watercourses all three had "skated" down the slippery banks, carving the mud into astonishing scrolls and arabesques. The mother had slid willy-nilly by reason of her weight, but her children, I felt sure, had tobogganed for sheer fun. My interest in the family party owned no sinister afterthought,-indeed, was almost affectionate; for though it was a fine day, I had no desire to kill anything. And the pound of strychnine

had ensured the safety of harmless travellers for long to come.

The hills gave way to grassy prairie, and the bridle-path widened to a carttrack. Far ahead of me down the road something glittered across the plain, something that moved in the direction of Ahrora, and moved very slowly. From half a mile away 1 judged it to be a laden pack-pony. Nearer inspection revealed a biped, and a little later the apparition took the form of an old man who limped. He travelled like a human caddis, with dingy bundles and little pots in basketwork covers slung round his body from the waist upwards, the apex of the load consisting of an empty kerosene oil-tin shining new. Even with the assistance of a tall staff he was making heavy weather of it. The veins of one calf, knotted into a tense swollen projection, were, I imagined, the chief source of his trouble, but he was very thin, the bundles appeared to contain little in the way of victuals, and his rags and wretched apologies for shoes bespoke abject, homeless poverty. The mare's nose drew level with his shoulder, and as he still seemed unconscious of my presence, I reined back a little to consider a suitable mode of attracting his attention.

There is a peculiar pleasure in doing little things properly, and in India the etiquette of addressing a stranger on the road, from behind or from a distance, is too important to be ignored by any man who has the least regard for the conventions. Briefly, in localities uncorrupted by the bad manners of large towns, the precise form of salutation is determined by the religion, caste, occupation, social position, and sex of the person addressed. Thus, there is a wide range of highflown Arabic titles appropriate to a Mohammedan. "Maharaj" will fit an obvious Brahman; "Patel," meaning "yeoman squire," beguiles a cheerful

reply from a poor cultivator with plough on shoulder. "O thou from Jagannath-Puri" should always be cried when the presence of a palm-leaf umbrella denotes that the bearer is a pilgrim from the famous shrine in Orissa; but men and women who have come from the well of the water of life, the amritpani, at Bandakpur, where the temple-gongs beat in honor of the great god Mahadeo, are hailed with the mystic monosyllable "Bom!" Pat comes the countersign: "Bom, bom. Mahadeo!" from the dusty file of pilgrims who hold their heads the higher for the recognition by a stranger of their merit and the toil that went to win it. "O little old human woman!" is called, with no hint of discourtesy, to the village crone, who, being hard of hearing, elects to walk in the very middle of the roadway. When all but the sex of the wayfarer is uncertain, there are many colorless makeshifts to fall back on, such as "O person with boots!" or, as a last resort, "O goer along the road!" a form which argues contemptible lack of resource in the individual who employs it. Now, the human caddis whom I was studying was certainly a Hindu, and, as his outfit showed, a pilgrim from or to somewhere, but these facts marked the limit of my deductive powers. Accordingly leaning towards him from the saddle and using a title applicable to elderly Hindus who have adopted, from choice, an ascetic life, I said in a loud voice, "Hey Baba!"

Instant disaster followed. Startled from his torpor, the old man lurched sideways with an exclamation, tripped over his staff, and fell crashing upon his pots and bundles and kerosene oil-tin. Pearl of the World, not without excuse, flung up her head and bolted, vanishing from under me with the uncanny velocity of the fairy horse of Oisin, which "went away like a summer fly," leaving the hero sprawl

ing in the sand. Exulting like a heifer in spring-time, with side-long unequine kicks and antics of utter abandonment, the shameless mare disappeared in a cloud of dust towards Ahrora, while her master, seated on the ground, was aware of feeble hands patting his head and shoulders, and a voice that murmured in despairing apology the names of many heathen dieties-Ram-Ram, Sita-Ram, Mahadeo, Narayan.

So the peace of the morning was shattered, and by the time I had convinced the old fellow that I was neither injured in body nor offended in spirit, the sun was shining from a clear sky, and the ribbed veils of cloud bad melted into the infinite æther. I helped him to refasten the oil-tin (picked up, he explained, on the road, and worth two annas in Ahrora), together with various other excrescences which had broken loose in his fall. Ahrora was five straight miles to our front. Besides ourselves and a herd of antelope, petrified spectators of our mishap, there was no living creature in sight. Then I said to myself that so long as my road-fellow's conversation was entertaining, we two would trudge together, but when he ceased to interest me I would lengthen my stride and leave him to his own company. Little I dreamed that before our journey was ended the gulf of the inscrutable Hindu mind, deep and dim as the misty forest ravines below the tigerhaunted pass in the hill, that gulf into which we Westerns peer and sound in vain with foolish fathom-lines of impertinent conjecture, would be illumined for me in one brief revealing hour by the flare of a human soul in agony. Frail, old, and also, it appeared, racked with asthma, he gasped out his replies to my questions eagerly, with frequent pauses to take breath, shaken, I supposed in mind and body, by the shock of the fall. And my interest in him quickened when his speech slipped

My

into a dialect familiar to me in the early years of my service. The tract where it was current lay far to the west, bordering on the Maratha country, crammed between an unfordable river and the steep sides of the Vindhyan plateau. It was on my lips to surprise him with the mention of certain villages, the naming of which, I guessed, would fall like chiming music on his ear,-Imlidol, Jhinfinni, Ron; but somewhere at the back of my brain -every magistrate and policeman knows the feeling-a warning signal sounded, and I held my tongue. first impression had been correct. He was, he informed me, on a journey of religion, bound for the bathing-ghats of Amarkantak, "the Navel of Hind," where, shrunken to a rivulet, Nerbudda-Mother the holy trickles from the sacred hill. He would strike the northern bank at Ahrora and work up along it to the sources, washing his body in the river thrice on every day of the march, as custom and the priestly rule prescribed. Then, when he had said so much, I praised his piety and stubborn resolution, and waited to hear more. Ten years of police work sharpen a man's discernment of certain symptoms. It was pitifully obvious that this wreck of humanity was talking wastefully to gain time, fending off inquiry on my part with an uncalled-for prodigality of words, that he was nervous and ill-atease during the intervals of silence. Such a man in the dock or witness-box will pour out his soul to the dregs, if given time. He swings like a pendulum between two fears. Has he not said too much? Then he must lead the hunt into blind issues and confuse the trail with more talking. But he dare not pause where he intended to, for, thinks he, here or there, the narrative will seem suspiciously incomplete. In the end he falls to the truth in sheer weariness. The old

man whom I had called "Baba" had something to conceal, and when I looked at the wicker bottle-covers, frayed ragged with much rubbing at their sides, smooth as old ivory where they swung against his back and shoulders, I deduced therefrom an inference. There is but one use for these bottles, the carriage of sacred waters; they are bought and sealed for no other purpose, and never bought at second-hand. His dialect had provided a clue to a point hitherto not mentioned by him-namely, the region of his home, and thence to his present position on the map the journey by road, even for such a poor goer as he, was a matter of weeks only. But the bottles bore mute witness to an entire Odyssey of travel antecedent to this latest and surely most painful pilgrimage of all. Old men sometimes vanish down the long roads of India for other reasons than to bathe in lustral waters, and a policeman's business is the business of all the world. And yet, I own, it was no professional prompting, but rather a lazy curiosity akin to cruelty, that held me silent by the Baba's side. I had only to wait. There is a torture of silence more compelling than the pain of rods. "Andata," he continued ("giver of sustenance" is the meaning of this rare old-time title: no one had called me Andata since I had left my first district), "who would think, to look at me, that I had traversed the way of the Four Corners on foot, every kos of the weary round? Seven years have I been on the road, and now, to crown merit with merit, I go to bathe at Amarkantak the Centre. This achieved, I shall rest, and never wear shoes again. The sun grows hotter every day, and the nights are colder than when I was young."

Now, the pilgrimage of the Four Corners is certainly a prodigious journey, the shrines lying as far apart as

any four points in India well can be. The first is the far-famed temple of Jagannath, on the shore of the Bay of Bengal. The second is at Rameshwaram, eight hundred miles down the coast, which is the take-off of Hanuman the monkey-god's leap across the strait into Ceylon. Dwarka in Kathiawar, a round thousand miles from Rameshwaram, is the third; and thence the road leads to the glacial head-springs of the sacred Ganges in Garhwal, under the Himalayas. This is the shortest lap of the tour as reckoned from Dwarka, but yet a clear seven hundred miles. Two and a half thousand miles is the measure of the full circuit, and having accomplished it the pilgrim has still his journey home to face, bringing with him holy water from each of the four shrines. The message of the frayed basketwork was now plain. Nevertheless I had seen enough of pilgrims and their ways to know that in these days the whole round is never, in ordinary circumstances, performed on foot, when for a third-class railway fare a month of weary footwork can be shortened into a twenty-four hours' ride. Stationmasters are

an indulgent

race. To beg the price of a ticket is easy; it is easier still for a frail and pious palmer to sit in the train without a ticket at all. If he rejects both alternatives, the public which pays policemen to protect it has a right to ask questions. Therefore, I said nothing and waited.

The aching sunlit silence closed in upon us once more. For the bodily ear there was no sound but the old man's labored breathing, the faint creak of wicker on wicker, the thud of his staff and the shuffle of ragged foot-wear in the dust. But the mental atmosphere, which in some mysterious fashion was thickening round us two at every step, throbbed loudly with a great unspoken "Why?" I held him, held him as