er side, spread white
flowers over the golden bed, and lighted a gold lamp with fragrant oil,
and adorned her hair, and dressed herself in a beautiful robe of blue,
and began to count the hours in expectation of the night.

That evening when her husband, the Brahman's son, had finished his
meal, too excited almost to eat, and had gone to the golden bed in the
bed-chamber strewn with flowers, he said to himself: "To-night I shall
surely know who this beautiful lady is in the palace with the seven
wings."

The princess took for her the food that was left over by her husband,
and slowly entered the bed-chamber. She had to answer that night the
question, which was the beautiful lady who lived in the palace with
the seven wings. And as she went up to the bed to tell him she found a
serpent had crept out of the flowers and had bitten the Brahman's son.
Her boy-husband was lying on the bed of flowers, with face pale in
death.

My heart suddenly ceased to throb, and I asked with choking voice: "What
then?"

Grannie said; "Then..."

But what is the use of going on any further with the story? It would
only lead on to what was more and more impossible. The boy of seven
did not know that, if there were some "What then?" after death, no
grandmother of a grandmother could tell us all about it.

But the child's faith never admits defeat, and it would snatch at the
mantle of death itself to turn him back. It would be outrageous for him
to think that such a story of one teacherless evening could so suddenly
come to a stop. Therefore the grandmother had to call back her story
from the ever-shut chamber of the great End, but she does it so simply:
it is merely by floating the dead body on a banana stem on the river,
and having some incantations read by a magician. But in that rainy night
and in the dim light of a lamp death loses all its horror in the mind of
the boy, and seems nothing more than a deep slumber of a single night.
When the story ends the tired eyelids are weighed down with sleep. Thus
it is that we send the little body of the child floating on the back of
sleep over the still water of time, and then in the morning read a few
verses of incantation to restore him to the world of life and light.

THE HOME-COMING

Phatik Chakravorti was ringleader among the boys of the village. A new
mischief got into his head. There was a heavy log lying on the mud-flat
of the river waiting to be shaped into a mast for a boat.