traffic, and the sharp-smelling wood smoke curling up under
the fig-trees in the twilight, where the wayfarers sit at their
evening meal.

When the time came to make that dream true the Prime Minister
took the proper steps, and in three days you might more easily
have found a bubble in the trough of the long Atlantic seas,
than Purun Dass among the roving, gathering, separating millions
of India.

At night his antelope skin was spread where the darkness
overtook him--sometimes in a Sunnyasi monastery by the roadside;
sometimes by a mud-pillar shrine of Kala Pir, where the Jogis,
who are another misty division of holy men, would receive him as
they do those who know what castes and divisions are worth;
sometimes on the outskirts of a little Hindu village, where
the children would steal up with the food their parents had
prepared; and sometimes on the pitch of the bare grazing-
grounds, where the flame of his stick fire waked the drowsy
camels. It was all one to Purun Dass--or Purun Bhagat, as he
called himself now. Earth, people, and food were all one. But
unconsciously his feet drew him away northward and eastward;
from the south to Rohtak; from Rohtak to Kurnool; from Kurnool
to ruined Samanah, and then up-stream along the dried bed of the
Gugger river that fills only when the rain falls in the hills,
till one day he saw the far line of the great Himalayas.

Then Purun Bhagat smiled, for he remembered that his mother was
of Rajput Brahmin birth, from Kulu way--a Hill-woman, always
home-sick for the snows--and that the least touch of Hill blood