teel railway bridge, but the same framework carries a
bullock-road.

From the bridge's northern end as far as the bazaar the main street goes
winding roughly parallel with the waterfront. Trees arch over it like a
cathedral roof, and through the huge branches the sun turns everything
beneath to gold, so that even the impious sacred monkeys achieve
vicarious beauty, and the scavenger mongrel dogs scratch, sleep, and are
miserable in an aureole.

There are modern signs, as for instance, a post office, some telegraph
wires on which birds of a thousand colors perch with an air of perpetual
surprise, and--tucked away in the city's busiest maze not four hundred
yards from the western wall--the office of the Sikh apothecary Mulji
Singh.

Mulji Singh takes life seriously, which is a laborious thing to do, and
being an apostle of simple sanitation is looked at askance by the
populace, but he persists.

King's specialty is making use of unconsidered trifles and misunderstood
babus.

* * * * *

King was attired as a native, when we sought out Mulji Singh together
and found him in a back street with a hundred-yard-long waiting list of
low-caste and altogether casteless cripples.

And of course Mulji Singh had all the gossip of the city at his fingers'
ends. When he closed his office at last, and we came inside to sit with
him, he loosed his tongue and would have told us everything he knew if
King had not steered the flow of information between channels.

"Aye, _sahib_, and this Mahatma, they say, is a very holy fellow, who
works miracles. Sometimes he sits under a tree by the burning ghat, but
at night he goes to the temple of the Tirthankers, where none dare
follow him, although they sit in crowds outside to watch him enter and
leave. The common rumor is that at night he leaves his body lifeless in
a crypt in that Tirthanker temple and flies to heaven, where he
fortifies himself with fresh magic. But I know where he goes by night.
There comes to me with boils a one-legged sweeper who cleans a black
panther's cage. The panther took his other leg. He sleeps in a cage
beside the panther's, and it is a part of his duty to turn the panther
loose on intruders. It is necessary that they warn this one-legged
fellow whenever a stranger is expected by night, who should not be torn
to pieces. Night after night he is warned. Night after night there comes
this Mahatma to spend the hours in heaven! There