hurry.'
"'Carry him! You can't do it up that slope, strong as you are, Taylor--I know you can't.'
"'Can't?' he echoed, as he stood up from his labours. 'Look at him and say can't again--if you can.'
"I looked and saw that the boy, but half conscious, yet restored to the memory of his object by the touch of the snow on which Taylor had laid him while engaged in bandaging my foot, had raised himself painfully on his hands and knees, and was struggling upwards, blindly, doggedly.
"'Damn it all,' continued the doctor fiercely, 'isn't that sight enough to haunt a man if he doesn't try? Besides, I may find that precious flower,--who knows?'
"As he spoke he stooped with the gentleness, not so much of sympathy, as of long practice in suffering, over the figure which, exhausted by its brief effort, already lay prostrate on the snow.
"'What is--the Presence--going--to do?' moaned Amra doubtfully, as he felt the strong arms close round him.
"'You and I are going to find the remission of sins together at Amar-nâth,' replied the Presence with a bitter laugh.
"The boy's head fell back on the doctor's shoulder as if accustomed to the resting-place. 'Amar-nâth!' he murmured. 'Yes! I am Amar-nâth.'
"So I sat there helpless, and watched them up the slope. Every slip, every stumble, seemed as if it were my own. I clenched my hands and set my teeth as if I too had part in the supreme effort, and when the straining figure passed out of sight I hid my face and tried not to think. It was the longest hour I ever spent before Taylor's voice holloing from the cliff above roused me to the certainty of success.
"'And the boy?' I asked eagerly.
"'Dead by this time, I expect,' replied the doctor shortly. 'Come on,--there's a good fellow,--we haven't a moment to lose. I must look again for the flower to-morrow.'
"But letters awaiting our return to camp recalled him to duty on account of cholera in the regiment; so there was an end of anemone hunting. The 101st suffered terribly, and Taylor was in consequence hotter than ever over experiments. The result you know."
"Yes, poor fellow! but the anemone? I don't understand how it came here."
My friend paused. "That is the odd thing. I was looking after the funeral and all that, for Taylor and I were great friends--he left me that herbarium in memory of our time in Cashmere. Well, when I went over to the house about an hour before to see everything done properly, his bearer brought me one of those little flat straw baskets the natives use. It had been left during my absence, he said, by a young Brahman, who assured him that it contained something which the great doctor sahib had been very anxious to possess, and which was now sent by some one to whom he had been very kind.
"'You told him the sahib was dead, I suppose?' I asked.
"'This slave informed him that the master had gained freedom, but he replied it was no matter, as all his task was this.' On opening the basket I found a gourd such as the disciples carry round for alms, and in it, planted among gypsum debris, was that anemone; or rather that is a part of it, for I put some in Taylor's coffin."
"Ah! I presume the gosain--Victor Emanuel, I think you called him--sent the plant; he knew of the doctor's desire?"
"Perhaps. The bearer said the Brahman was a very handsome boy, very fair, dressed in the usual black antelope skin of the disciple. It is a queer story anyhow--is it not?"
HARVEST.
[Respectfully dedicated to our law-makers in India, who, by giving to the soldier-peasants of the Punjab the novel right of alienating their ancestral holdings, are fast throwing the land, and with it the balance of power, into the hands of money-grubbers; thus reducing those who stood by us in our time of trouble to the position of serfs.]
"Ai! Daughter of thy grandmother," muttered old Jaimul gently, as one of his yoke wavered, making the handle waver also. The offender was a barren buffalo doomed temporarily to the plough, in the hopes of inducing her to look more favourably on the first duty of the female sex, so she started beneath the unaccustomed goad.
"Ari! sister, fret not," muttered Jaimul again, turning from obscure abuse to palpable flattery, as being more likely to gain his object; and once more the tilted soil glided between his feet, traced straight by his steady hand. In that vast expanse of bare brown field left by or waiting for the plough, each new furrow seemed a fresh diameter of the earth-circle which lay set in the bare blue horizon--a circle centring always on Jaimul and his plough. A brown dot for the buffalo, a white dot for the ox, a brown and white dot for the old peasant with his lanky brown limbs and straight white drapery, his brown face, and long white beard. Brown, and white, and blue, with the promise of harvest sometime if the blue was kind. That was all Jaimul knew or cared. The empire beyond, hanging on the hope of harvest, lay far from his simple imaginings; and yet he, the old peasant with his steady hand of patient control, held the reins of government over how many million square miles? That is the province of the Blue Book, and Jaimul's blue book was the sky.
"Bitter blue sky with no fleck of a cloud,
Ho! brother ox! make the plough speed.
[Ai! soorin! straight, I say!]
'Tis the usurers' bellies wax fat and proud
When poor folk are in need."
The rude guttural chant following these silent, earth-deadened footsteps was the only sound breaking the stillness of the wide plain.
"Sky dappled grey like a partridge's breast,
Ho! brother ox! drive the plough deep.
[Steady, my sister, steady!]
The peasants work, but the usurers rest
Till harvest's ripe to reap."
So on and on interminably, the chant and the furrow, the furrow and the chant, both bringing the same refrain of flattery and abuse, the same antithesis--the peasant and the usurer face to face in conflict, and above them both the fateful sky, changeless or changeful as it chooses.
The sun climbed up and up till the blue hardened into brass, and the mere thought of rain seemed lost in the blaze of light. Yet Jaimul, as he finally unhitched his plough, chanted away in serene confidence--
"Merry drops slanting from west to east,
Ho! brother ox! drive home the wain;
'Tis the usurer's belly that gets the least
When Râm sends poor folk rain."
The home whither he drove the lagging yoke was but a whitish-brown mound on the bare earth-circle, not far removed from an ant-hill to alien eyes; for all that, home to the uttermost. Civilisation, education, culture could produce none better. A home bright with the welcome of women, the laughter of children. Old Kishnu, mother of them all, wielding a relentless despotism tempered by profound
