ceasing. I have never harmed a living soul. They
themselves say I am merciful. It is no pleasure to me to have people
killed. The Powers will come to save me. They will not let me die. Why
are those rebels so quick? They do not give me time, and all my plans
were ready! Far down in Asia the killing has begun. Why does not the
telegraph speak? The Powers will intervene. They will not let me die."

"Sire," said the jester, "people are lighting lamps in the street. They
are firing guns. They are crying 'Long live the new Sultan!' Your
Majesty's brother is proclaimed."

"I am the Sultan," cried the voice; "I am the Khalif, I am the successor
of the Prophet. Tell them I am the successor of the Prophet! Tell them
they dare not kill me!"

"Sire," said the jester, "greatness shares the common fate. The will of
the Eternal is above all monarchs."

The firing of many rifles was heard in the street below. The door of the
large chamber was flung wide, open, and a flood of yellow light revealed
the piled up luggage, the muffled forms of women, and a dark little
figure curled upon the divan, his head hidden in his arms.

"Oh, be merciful," he cried. "Spare my life, only spare my life! What,
would you kill a ruler like me? Would you kill an old, old man?"

"Your Highness," said an officer in a quiet voice, "dinner is served."

XX

"NATIVES"

No doubt the Gods laughed when Macaulay went to India. Among the
millions who breathed religion, and whose purpose in life was the
contemplation of eternity, a man intruded himself who could not even
meditate, and regarded all religion, outside the covers of the Bible, as
a museum of superstitious relics. Into the midst of peoples of an
immemorial age, which seemed to them as unworthy of reckoning as the
beating wings of a parrot's flight from one temple to the next, there
came a man in whose head the dates of European history were arranged in
faultless compartments, and to whom the past presented itself as a
series of Ministerial crises, diversified by oratory and political
songs. To Indians the word progress meant the passage of the soul
through aeons of reincarnation towards a blissful absorption into the
inconceivable void of indistinctive existence, as when at last a jar is
broken and the space inside it returns to space. For Macaulay the word
progress called up a bustling picture of mechanical inventions, an
increasing output of manufactured goods, a larger demand for impro