Order of the Indian Empire; so that his name stood Sir Purun
Dass, K.C.I.E.

That evening, at dinner in the big Viceregal tent, he stood up
with the badge and the collar of the Order on his breast,
and replying to the toast of his master's health, made a speech
few Englishmen could have bettered.

Next month, when the city had returned to its sun-baked quiet,
he did a thing no Englishman would have dreamed of doing;
for, so far as the world's affairs went, he died. The jewelled
order of his knighthood went back to the Indian Government,
and a new Prime Minister was appointed to the charge of affairs,
and a great game of General Post began in all the subordinate
appointments. The priests knew what had happened, and the people
guessed; but India is the one place in the world where a man can
do as he pleases and nobody asks why; and the fact that Dewan
Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., had resigned position, palace, and
power, and taken up the begging-bowl and ochre-coloured dress of
a Sunnyasi, or holy man, was considered nothing extraordinary.
He had been, as the Old Law recommends, twenty years a youth,
twenty years a fighter,--though he had never carried a weapon in
his life,--and twenty years head of a household. He had used his
wealth and his power for what he knew both to be worth; he had
taken honour when it came his way; he had seen men and cities
far and near, and men and cities had stood up and honoured him.
Now he would let those things go, as a man drops the cloak he no
longer needs.

Behind him, as he walked through the city gates, an antelope
skin and brass-handled crutch under his arm, and a begging-bowl
of polished brown coco-de-mer in his hand, barefoot, alone, with
eyes cast on the ground--behind him they were firing salutes
from the bastions in honour of his happy successor. Purun Dass
nodded. All that life was ended; and he bore it no more ill-will
or good-will than a man bears to a colourless dream of the
night. He was a Sunnyasi--a houseless, wandering mendicant,
depending on his neighbours for his daily bread; and so long as
there is a morsel to divide in India, neither priest nor beggar
starves. He had never in his life tasted meat, and very seldom
eaten even fish. A five-pound note would have covered his
personal expenses for food through any one of the many years in
which he had been absolute master of millions of money. Even
when he was being lionised in London he had held before him his
dream of peace and quiet--the long, white, dusty Indian road,
printed all over with bare feet, the incessant, slow-moving
traffic, and the sharp-smelling wood smoke curling up under
the fig-trees in the twilight, where the wayfarers sit at their
evening meal.

When the time came to make that dream true the Prime Minister
took the proper steps, and in three days you might more easily
have found a bubble in the trough of the long Atlantic seas,
than Purun Dass among the roving, gathering, separating millions
of India.

At night his antelope skin was spread where the darkness
overtook him--sometimes in a Sunnyasi monastery by the roadside;
sometimes by a mud-pillar shrine of Kala Pir, where the Jogis,
who are another misty division of holy men, would receive him as
they do those who know what castes and divisions are worth;
sometimes on the outskirts of a little Hindu village, where
the children would steal up with the food their parents had
prepared; and sometimes on the pitch of the bare grazing-
grounds, where the flame of his stick fire waked the drowsy
camels. It was all one to Purun Dass--or Purun Bhagat, as he
called himself now. Earth, people, and food were all one. But
unconsciously his feet drew him away northward and eastward;
from the south to Rohtak; from Rohtak to Kurnool; from Kurnool
to ruined Samanah, and then up-stream along the dried bed of the
Gugger river that fills only when the rain falls in the hills,
till one day he saw the far line of the great Himalayas.

Then Purun Bhagat smiled, for he remembered that his mother was
of Rajput Brahmin birth, from Kulu way--a Hill-woman, always
home-sick for the snows--and that the least touch of Hill blood
draws a man in the end back to where he belongs.

"Yonder," said Purun Bhagat, breasting the lower slopes of
the Sewaliks, where the cacti stand up like seven-branched
candlesticks-"yonder I shall sit down and get knowledge";
and the cool wind of the Himalayas whistled about his ears
as he trod the road that led to Simla.

The last time he had come that way it had been in state, with
a clattering cavalry escort, to visit the gentlest and most
affable of Viceroys; and the two had talked for an hour together
about mutual friends in London, and what the Indian common folk
really thought of things. This time Purun Bhagat paid no calls,
but leaned on the rail of the Mall, watching that glorious view
of the Plains spread out forty miles below, till a native
Mohammedan policeman told him he was obstructing traffic; and
Purun Bhagat salaamed reverently to the Law, because he knew the
value of it, and was seeking for a Law of his own. Then he moved
on, and slept that night in an empty hut at Chota Simla, which
looks like the very last end of the earth, but it was only the
beginning of his journey. He followed the Himalaya-Thibet road,
the little ten-foot track that is blasted out of solid rock,
or strutted out on timbers over gulfs a thousand feet deep;
that dips into warm, wet, shut-in valleys, and climbs out


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