re the man is lying. A pot of
flowers is standing on a shelf on one side, and a few cloths are hung
here and there beneath the brown rafters. The sun comes in through
little chinks in roof and wall, making curious lights in the
semi-darkness of the room, and it is very hot.

From outside come the noises of the village, cries of children playing,
grunts of cattle, voices of men and women clearly heard through the
still clear air of the afternoon. There is a woman pounding rice near
by with a steady thud, thud of the lever, and there is a clink of a loom
where a girl is weaving ceaselessly. All these sounds come into the
house as if there were no walls at all, but they are unheeded from long
custom.

The man lies on a low bed with a fine mat spread under him for bedding.
His wife, his grown-up children, his sister, his brother are about him,
for the time is short, and death comes very quickly in the East. They
talk to him kindly and lovingly, but they read to him no sacred books;
they give him no messages from the world to which he is bound; they
whisper to him no hopes of heaven. He is tortured with no fears of
everlasting hell. Yet life is sweet and death is bitter, and it is hard
to go; and as he tosses to and fro in his fever there comes in to him an
old friend, the headman of the village perhaps, with a white muslin
fillet bound about his kind old head, and he sits beside the dying man
and speaks to him.

'Remember,' he says slowly and clearly, 'all those things that you have
done well. Think of your good deeds.'

And as the sick man turns wearily, trying to move his thoughts as he is
bidden, trying to direct the wheels of memory, the old man helps him to
remember.

'Think,' he says, 'of your good deeds, of how you have given charity to
the monks, of how you have fed the poor. Remember how you worked and
saved to build the little rest-house in the forest where the traveller
stays and finds water for his thirst. All these are pleasant things, and
men will always be grateful to you. Remember your brother, how you
helped him in his need, how you fed him and went security for him till
he was able again to secure his own living. You did well to him, surely
that is a pleasant thing.'

I do not think it difficult to see how the sick man's face will lighten,
how his eyes will brighten at the thoughts that come to him at the old
man's words. And he goes on:

'Remember when the squall came up the river and the boat up