me of General Post began in all the
subordinate appointments. The priests knew what had happened, and the
people guessed; but India is the one place in the world where a man can
do as he pleases and nobody asks why; and the fact that Dewan Sir Purun
Dass, K.C.I.E., had resigned position, palace, and power, and taken up
the begging-bowl and ochre-coloured dress of a Sunnyasi, or holy man,
was considered nothing extraordinary. He had been, as the Old Law
recommends, twenty years a youth, twenty years a fighter,--though he
had never carried a weapon in his life,--and twenty years head of a
household. He had used his wealth and his power for what he knew both to
be worth; he had taken honour when it came his way; he had seen men and
cities far and near, and men and cities had stood up and honoured him.
Now he would let those things go, as a man drops the cloak he no longer
needs.

Behind him, as he walked through the city gates, an antelope skin and
brass-handled crutch under his arm, and a begging-bowl of polished
brown coco-de-mer in his hand, barefoot, alone, with eyes cast on the
ground--behind him they were firing salutes from the bastions in honour
of his happy successor. Purun Dass nodded. All that life was ended;
and he bore it no more ill-will or good-will than a man bears to a
colourless dream of the night. He was a Sunnyasi--a houseless, wandering
mendicant, depending on his neighbours for his daily bread; and so
long as there is a morsel to divide in India, neither priest nor beggar
starves. He had never in his life tasted meat, and very seldom eaten
even fish. A five-pound note would have covered his personal expenses
for food through any one of the many years in which he had been absolute
master of millions of money. Even when he was being lionised in London
he had held before him his dream of peace and quiet--the long, white,
dusty Indian road, printed all over with bare feet, the incessant,
slow-moving 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