shining in the afternoon light like a diaper of gold.

'The potter's wheel!' he cried, his face changing indescribably in an instant. 'Come on, Keene, and let us see the man who made your first bribe!'

He gave no time for reply, but turning at right angles through a gap threaded his way past piles of pots and sherds until he ran the sound to earth. Literally to earth--a circle of the solid earth spinning dizzily in front of a man buried to his waist. At least so it seemed at first to George Keene's ignorance of potters and their wheels. A circle, dazzling at its outer edge, clearer at the centre where something beneath a steady curved hand shot up, and bulged; then, as the whirr slackened, sank into a bomb of clay.

'Salaam alaikoom!' came a pleasant voice as the worker sat back in his seat-hole so as to ease his feet. He was a mild-faced old gentleman with nothing remarkable about him save a pair of shifty eyes--the light hazel eyes seen so rarely in a native's face.

'Salaam alaikoom,' returned Dan. 'The little sahib has never seen a wheel worked. Will you show him?'

'Wherefore not, Huzoor? The sahib could come to none better, seeing we of Hodinuggur have spun the wheel of life for years--for ages and ages and ages.'

The words blent with the rising cadence of the wheel as he leant forward to the task again. Faster and faster upon the wheel with a swaying motion. Only the potter's hand poised motionless above the whirring clay which showed--as children say--like a top asleep. Then suddenly came the turn of the potter's thumb, bringing a strange weird life with it. One protean curve after another swelling, sinking, shifting, falling. The eye could scarcely follow their swift birth and death, until the potter, sitting back once more, the slackening wheel disclosed the hollows and bosses.

'The clay is good,' he said, as if deprecating his own skill, 'and it fires well.'

'When the thumb does not slip,' put in Dan quietly. The potter turned to him in sudden interest.

'The Huzoor knows the sayings of the people, that is well; it is not often so. Yea! it slips--thus.' The wheel still span slowly, he shifted his hand almost imperceptibly and a deep furrow scored itself upon the biggest boss. 'So little does it,' he went on, 'a grit clinging to the skin--a wandering thought. It is Fate. Fuzl Elâhi, the potter, cannot help it.'

'Fuzl Elâhi? Then you are a Mohammedan?'

He shook his head. 'I am as my fathers were. The Moghuls call me so, the Hindus otherwise; but it means the same. By the grace of God, potter of Hodinuggur since time began. Lo! my fathers and my children are in the clay. I dug a grave in the dust for the boy; the girl dug hers for herself. It was deep, Huzoor. I search for it always; in vain, in vain.' The wheel set up its rhythmic hum once more, but the hands lay idle.

'Poor old chap,' said Dan aside, 'I suppose he is thinking of the accident; but by the powers, Keene, it is a situation. Seated here on a pinnacle--a crazy irresponsible creator----'

'Ask him if he made the pot, please,' interrupted George brutally. 'If I could get a pair, I'd send them to the mater. Those things are always in pairs, you know.'

'Pairs! you intolerable Philistine! A potter's vessel trying to be matched before it's broken in pieces. Think of the tragedy--the humour of it.'

'Will you ask, or shall I?'

Fitzgerald grinned maliciously. 'You. I like to hear you stuttering.'

George smiled, rose, and taking the blue pot from the attendant's tray laid it on the potter's wheel.

'Did you make that?' he asked, in English. His meaning was palpable.

'No, Huzoor.'

'If you did not, who did?' he continued, his triumph mixed with anxiety for the future; but the old man's thoughts did duty for an answer.

'Without doubt my fathers made it; since it is an Ayôdhya pot.'

'Ayôdhya,' broke in Dan, 'that means old, Keene; you'll have to send it back. I half suspected it was valuable, from that old fox's look. But he said it was made here, the sinner! Can you make pots like that, oh! Fuzl Elâhi?'

The old man smiled. 'None can give the glaze, Huzoor, there is a pattern in it, but none can catch the design. Even I know it not; that is the secret of Ayôdhya.'

'What is he saying? What is Ayôdhya?' asked George irritably.

'Same as Hodi--old; it means here the half-forgotten heroic age. Well, as you can't get a pair, we had best be moving. Salaam! potter-ji, and don't let your thumb slip too often in the future.'

'God send it hath not slipped too often in the past,' he replied, half to himself.

An hour afterwards the two Englishmen sat on the low parapet of the canal bridge looking out over a world-circle of dusty plain, treeless, featureless, save for the shadowy mound of Hodinuggur on one side, and on the other a red brick house dotted causelessly upon the sand. A world-circle split into halves by the great canal, which eastwards towards the invisible hills showed like a bar of silver; westwards towards the invisible sea like a flash of gold, at whose end the last beams of the setting sun hung like the star on a magician's wand.

'Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink,' murmured Dan Fitzgerald discontentedly. 'Upon my soul, it must be rough on them watching it all day long, and knowing that if they could only get you to open the sluice they would get rupees on rupees from the Rajah. That's how it stands, you see. It isn't so much for their own bit of land, but for the bribe. I sometimes wish the overflow cut had been higher up, or lower down; but we had to protect the big embankment against abnormal floods. Confound the thing! what business has it to put hydraulic pressure on us all?'

'Don't feel it much as yet,' said George cheerfully, with his eyes on the palace, which was gaining an unreal beauty from the dust of ages. For the village cattle were homing to the thorn-set folds, and the cloud from their leisurely feet lay in a golden mist between the shadowed plain and the shadowed mound rising against the golden sky. A lingering shaft of light showed the white fretwork of the Diwân's tower clear against the pale purple of the potter's thatch beyond.

'Perhaps not. You will, though. The wilderness plays the dickens with civilisation sometimes.'

'Does it? I don't believe it will with mine. Not that sort. I haven't your imagination, your sensitiveness, your poetical----'

'Pull up,' said Dan, laughing. 'You'll come to my vices soon, and as I've pet names for most of them, I object to have them scientifically classified. But I wish I hadn't to leave you there.' He pointed distastefully to the red parallelogram of a house with the initials of the Public Works Department stamped on each brick like the broad arrow on a convict. 'It isn't fit for a youngster like you. But as it can't be helped, there's the key. For my sake don't let the World, the Flesh, or the Devil wheedle it out of you.'

'All right,' replied the boy, pocketing the Chubb. 'If you are engaged to be married, go and do it right off. Promotion in due course guaranteed.'

Dan Fitzgerald, looking down at the sliding water, was silent for a minute. 'You've hit the right nail on the head,' he said at last. 'That's why I'm anxious; but by the powers! your work is cut out for you if you are to keep me from getting into hot water.'

'It isn't the water that does it,' muttered George, as they strolled off to dinner, 'it's the