ember the time when Katie Alison
was not as a dream in my heart--when I did not tremble at her touch.
Even when we pulled the gowans and cowslips together, though there had
been twenty present, it was for Katie that I pulled mine. When we
plaited the rushes, I did it for her. She preferred me to Jamie, and I
knew it. When I left your school, and when I proceeded to India, I did
not forget her. But, as you said, men go there to make money--so did
I. My friends laughed at my boyish fancy--they endeavoured to make me
ashamed of it. I became smitten with the eastern disease of
fortune-making, and, though I did not forget her, I neglected her.

But, sir, to drop this: I was not twenty-one when I arrived in Bombay;
nor had I been long there till I was appointed physician to several
Parsee families of great wealth. With but little effort, fortune
opened before me. I performed a few surgical operations of
considerable difficulty, with success. In several desperate cases I
effected cures, and my name was spread not only through the city, but
throughout the island. The riches I went to seek I found. But even
then, sir, my heart would turn to your school, and to the happy hours
I had spent by the side of bonny Katie Alison.

However, it would be of no interest to enter into the details of my
monotonous life. I shall dwell only upon one incident, which is, of
all others, the most remarkable that ever occurred to me, and which
took place about six years after my arrival in India. I was in my
carriage, and accompanying the remains of a patient to the burial
ground--for you know that doctors cannot cure, when death is
determined to have its way. The burial ground lies about three miles
from Bombay, across an extensive and beautiful plain, and the road to
it is by a sort of avenue, lined and shaded on each side by
cocoa-nut-trees, which spread their branches over the path, and distil
their cooling juice into the cups which the Hindoos have placed around
them to receive it. You can form but a faint conception of the clear
azure of an Indian sky, and never had I seen it more beautiful than on
the day to which I refer, though some of the weather-prophets about
Bombay were predicting a storm.

We were about the middle of the avenue I have described, when we
overtook the funeral of an officer who had held a commission in a
corps of Sepoys. The coffin was carried upon the shoulders of four
soldiers; before it marched the Sepoys, and behin