ur days did their work. She yielded her will on
the twenty-fifth. So the mother and the Brahman won.

These letters are written, as you know, with a definite purpose. We try
to show you what goes on behind the door, the very door of the
photograph, type of all the doors, that seeing behind you may understand
how fiercely the tiger bites.

CHAPTER XXIII

"Pan, Pan is Dead"

"If there is one thing that refreshes my soul
above all others, it is that I shall behold the
Redeemer gloriously triumphant at the winding up
of all things."
_Henry Martyn, N. India._

"PARTLY founded upon a well-known tradition, mentioned by Plutarch,
according to which, at the hour of the Saviour's Agony, a cry of, 'Great
Pan is dead,' swept across the waves in the hearing of certain mariners,
and the oracles ceased." So reads the head-note to one of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning's poems. We look up a classical dictionary, and find
the legend there. "This was readily believed by the Emperor, and the
astrologers were consulted, but they were unable to explain the meaning
of so supernatural a voice."

Pan, and with him all the false gods of the old world, die in the day of
the death of our Saviour,--this according to the poem--

"Gods, we vainly do adjure you,--
Ye return nor voice nor sign!
Not a votary could secure you
Even a grave for your Divine;
Not a grave, to show thereby,
Here these grey old gods do lie.
Pan, Pan is dead."

And yet--is he dead? quite dead?

. . . . . . .

Night, moonless and hot. Our camp is pitched on the west bank of the
river; we are asleep. Suddenly there is what sounds like an explosion
just outside. Then another and another,--such a bursting bang,--then a
s-s-swish, and I am out of bed, standing out on the sand; and for a
moment I am sure the kitchen tent is on fire. Then it dawns on me, in
the slow way things dawn in the middle of the night: it is only
fireworks being let off by the festival people--only fireworks!

But I stand and look, and in the darkness everything seems much bigger
than it is and much more awful. There is the gleaming of water, lit by
the fires of the crowd on the eastern bank of the river. There are
torches waving uncertainly in and out of the vast black mass--black even
in the black