boys and owners of the cattle would be
distressed, created, in a moment, another herd and other attendants
so exactly like those that Brahma had taken, that the owners of the
one, and the parents of the other, remained ignorant of the change.
Even the new creations themselves remained equally ignorant; and the
cattle walked into their stalls, and the boys into their houses,
where they recognized and were recognized by their parents, as if
nothing had happened.

'Brahma was now satisfied that Krishna was a true incarnation of
Vishnu, and restored to him the real herd and attendants. The others
were removed out of the way by Krishna, as soon as he saw the real
ones coming back.'

'But,' said I to the good old man, who told me this with a grave
face, 'must they not have suffered in passing from the life given to
death; and why create them merely to destroy them again?'

'Was he not God the Creator himself?' said the old man; 'does he not
send one generation into the world after another to fulfil their
destiny, and then to return to the earth from which they came, just
as he spreads over the land the grass and corn? All is gathered in
its season, or withers as that passes away and dies.' The old
gentleman might have quoted Wordsworth:

We die, my friend,
Nor we alone, but that which each man loved
And prized in his peculiar nook of earth
Dies with him, or is changed; and very soon,
Even of the good is no memorial left.[9]

I was one day out shooting with my friend, the Raja of Maihar,[10]
under the Vindhya range, which rises five or six hundred feet, almost
perpendicularly. He was an excellent shot with an English double-
barrel, and had with him six men just as good. I asked him whether we
were likely to fall in with any hares, using the term 'khargosh', or
'ass-eared'.

'Certainly not,' said the Raja, 'if you begin by abusing them with
such a name; call them "lambkanas", sir, "long-eared", and we shall
get plenty.'

He shot one, and attributed my bad luck to the opprobrious name I had
used. While he was reloading, I took occasion to ask him how this
range of hills had grown up where it was.

'No one can say,' replied the Raja, 'but we believe that when Rama
went to recover his wife Sita from the demon king of Ceylon, Ravan,
he wanted to throw a bridge across from the continent to the island,
and sent some of his followers up to the Himalaya mountains fo