he
foresight. All three guns were loaded, and the owners were very proud of
them. They were simple folk, these men-at-arms, with an inordinate
appetite for broiled fish. They were not _always_ soldiers they
explained. They cultivated their crops until called for any duty that
might turn up. They were paid now and again, at intervals, but they were
paid in coin and not in kind.

The _munshis_ and the vakils and the runners had departed after seeing
that the Englishman was safe for the night, so the freedom of the little
gathering on the bund was unrestrained. The _chowkidar_ came out of his
cave into the firelight. He took a fish and incontinently choked, for he
was a feeble old man. Set right again, he launched into a very long and
quite unintelligible story while the sepoys said reverently: "He is an
old man and remembers many things." As he babbled, the night shut in
upon the lake and the valley of Boondi. The last cows were driven into
the water for their evening drink, the waterfowl and the monkeys went to
bed, and the stars came out and made a new firmament in the untroubled
bosom of the lake. The light of the fire showed the ruled lines of the
bund springing out of the soft darkness of the wooded hill on the left
and disappearing into the solid darkness of a bare hill on the right.
Below the bund a man cried aloud to keep wandering pigs from the gardens
whose tree-tops rose to a level with the bund-edge. Beyond the trees all
was swaddled in gloom. When the gentle buzz of the unseen city died
out, it seemed as though the bund were the very Swordwide Bridge that
runs, as every one knows, between this world and the next. The water
lapped and muttered, and now and again a fish jumped, with the shatter
of broken glass, blurring the peace of the reflected heavens.

"And duller should I be than some fat weed
That rolls itself at ease on Lethe's wharf."

The poet who wrote those lines knew nothing whatever of Lethe's wharf.
The Englishman had found it, and it seemed to him, at that hour and in
that place, that it would be good and desirable never to return to the
Commissioners and the Deputy Commissioners any more, but to lie at ease
on the warm sunlit bund by day, and, at night, near a shadow-breeding
fire, to listen for the strangled voices and whispers of the darkness in
the hills. Thus after as long a life as the _chowkidar's_, dying easily
and pleasantly, and being buried in a red tomb on the borders of the