xoras and creeping nagatallis,--away from the
Baboo's park, shady with banians, and fragrant with sandal-trees, and
imposing with tall peepuls, and cool with sparkling fountains,--away
from the Baboo's home, away from the Baboo's heart, bereft thenceforth
forever! For Chinna Tumbe follows fast, crying, _Wah, wah!_ and clapping
his hands, and jingling gleefully all his silver bells,--follows across
the road, and through the bamboo hedge, and into the darkness and the
danger of the jungle; and the pleasant peddler all the way from Cabool
goes smiling after,--but, as he goes, what is it that he draws from
the breast of his dusty _coortee_? Only a slender, smooth cord, with a
slip-knot at the end of it.

Within the twelvemonth, in a stony nullah, hard by a clump of crooked
saul-trees, a mile away from the Baboo's gate, some jackals brought to
light the bones of a little child; and the deep grave from which they
dug them with their sharp, busy claws, bore marks of the mystic pick-axe
of Thuggee. But there were no tinkling bells, no chain of gold, no
silver whistle; and the cockatoos and the goldfishes knew Chinna Tumbe
no more.

When a name was bestowed on the Little Brother, the Brahmins wrote a
score of pretty words in rice, and set over each a lamp freshly trimmed,
and the name whose light burned brightest, with happy augury, was
"Chinna Tumbe." And when they had likewise inscribed the day of his
birth, and the name of his natal star, the proud and happy Baboo cried,
with a loud voice, three times, "Chinna Tumbe," and all the Brahmins
stretched forth their hands and pronounced _Asowadam_,--benediction.
Then they performed _arati_ about the child's head, to avert the Evil
Eye, describing mystic circles with lamps of rice-paste set on copper
salvers, with many pious incantations. But, spite of all, the Evil Eye
overtook Chinna Tumbe, when the pleasant peddler came all the way from
Cabool, with his bushy-tailed kitten, and his mungooz cracking nuts.

They do say the ghost of Chinna Tumbe walks,--that always at midnight,
when the Indian nightingale fills the Baboo's banian topes with her
lugubrious song, and the weird ulus hoot from the peepul tops, a child,
girt with silver bells, and followed by a Persian kitten and a mungooz,
shakes the Baboo's gate, blows upon a silver whistle, and cries, so
piteously, "Ayah! Ayah!"

* * * * *

At Hurdwar, in the great fair, among jugglers and tumblers,