scene may be forgotten; the marriage procession swerving to give way to the quiet dead, swathed in muslins and bound with tinsel, carried high on the string bed, or awaiting sunset and burial in some narrow by-way among green-gold melons and piles of red wheat. But to those who have known an Indian bazaar well, the chink of money, and the smell of a chemist's shop, will ever remain a more potent spell to awaken memory than any elaborate pictures made by pen or pencil.

On this particular morning quite a little crowd was collected round the doorway leading to the house of one Shunker Dâs, usurer, contractor, and honorary magistrate; a man who combined those three occupations into one unceasing manufacture of money. In his hands pice turned to annas, annas to rupees, and rupees in their turn to fat. For there is no little truth in the assertion that the real test of a buniah's (money-lender's) wealth is his weight, and the safest guard for income-tax his girth in inches.

Nevertheless a skeleton lay hidden under Shunker Dâs's mountain of prosperous flesh; a gruesome skeleton whose bones rattled ominously. Between him and the perdition of a sonless death stood but one life; a life so frail that it had only been saved hitherto by the expedient of dressing the priceless boy in petticoats, and so palming him off on the dread Shiva as a girl. At least so said the zenana women, and so in his inmost heart thought Shunker Dâs, though he was a prime specimen of enlightened native society. But on that day the fateful first decade during which the Destroyer had reft away so many baby-heirs from the usurer's home was over; and amid countless ceremonies, and much dispensation of alms, the little Nuttu, with his ears and nose pierced like a girl's, had been attired in the pugree and pyjamas of his sex. Hence the crowd closing in round the Lâlâ's Calcutta-built barouche which waited for its owner to come out. Hence the number of professional beggars, looking on the whole more fat and well-liking than the workers around them, certainly more so than a small group of women who were peeping charily from the door of the next house,--a very different house from Shunker Dâs's pretentious stucco erection with its blue elephants and mottled tigers frescoed round the top storey, and a railway train, flanked by two caricatures of the British soldier, over the courtyard doorway. This was a tall, square, colourless tower, gaining its only relief from the numerous places where the outer skin of bricks had fallen away, disclosing the hard red mortar beneath; mortar that was stronger than stone; mortar that had been ground and spread long years before the word "contractor" was a power in India. Here in poverty, abject in all save honour, dwelt Mahomed Lateef, a Syyed of the Syyeds;^[1] and it was his hewers of wood and drawers of water who formed the group at the door, turning their lean faces away disdainfully when the baskets of dough cakes, and trays of sweet rice were brought out for distribution from the idolater's house.

The crowd thickened, but fell away instinctively to give place to a couple of English soldiers who came tramping along shoulder to shoulder, utterly unconcerned and unsympathetic; their Glengarry caps set at the same angle, the very pipes in their mouths having a drilled appearance. Such a quiet, orderly crowd it was; not even becoming audible when Shunker Dâs appeared with little Nuttu, the hero of the day, who in a coat of the same brocade as his father's, and a pugree tied in the same fashion, looked a wizened, changeling double of his unwieldy companion. The barouche was brilliant as to varnish, vivid as to red linings, and the bay Australians were the best money could buy; yet the people, as it passed, took small notice of the Lâlâ, lolling in gorgeous attire against the Berlin-wool-worked cushion which he had bought from the Commissioner's wife at a bazaar in aid of a cathedral. They gave far more attention to a hawk-eyed old man with a cruel, high-bred face, who rode by on a miserable pony, and after returning the Lâlâ's contemptuous salutation with grave dignity, spat solemnly into the gutter.

This was Mahomed Lateef, who but the day before had put the talisman-signet on his right hand to a deed mortgaging the last acre of his ancestral estate to the usurer. Yet the people stood up with respectful salaams to him, while they had only obsequious grins for the other. Indeed, one old patriarch waiting for death in the sun, curled up comfortably, his chin upon his knees, on a bed stuck well into the street, nodded his head cheerfully and muttered "Shunker's father was nobody," over and over again till he fell asleep; to dream perchance of the old order of things.

Meanwhile the Lâlâ waited his turn for audience at the District Officer's bungalow. There were many other aspirants to that honour, seated on a row of cane-bottomed chairs in the verandah, silent, bored, uncomfortable. It is an irony of fate which elevates the chair in India into a patent of position, for nowhere does the native look more thoroughly out of place than in the coveted honour. As it is he clings to it, notably with his legs; those thin legs round whose painful want of contour the tight cotton pantaloons wrinkle all too closely, and which would be so much better tucked away under dignified skirts in true Eastern fashion. But the exotic has a strange fascination for humanity. Waiting there for his turn, the Lâlâ inwardly cursed the Western morality which prevented an immediate and bribe-won entry; but the red-coated badge-wearers knew better than to allow even a munificent shoe-money to interfere with the roster. The harassed-looking, preoccupied official within had an almost uncanny quickness of perception, so the rupees chinked into their pockets, but produced no effect beyond whining voices and fulsome flattery.

"Well, Lâlâ-ji! and what do you want?" asked the representative of British majesty when, at last, Shunker Dâs's most obsequious smile curled out over his fat face. There was no doubt a certain brutality of directness in the salutation, but it came from a deadly conviction that a request lay at the bottom of every interview, and that duty bade its discovery without delay. The abruptness of the magistrate was therefore compressed politeness. As he laid down the pen with which he had been writing a judgment, and leant wearily back in his chair, his bald head was framed, as it were, in a square nimbus formed by a poster on the wall behind. It was four feet square, and held, in treble columns, a list of all the schedules and reports due from his office during the year to come. That was his patent of position; and it was one which grows visibly, as day by day, and month by month, law and order become of more consequence than truth and equity in the government of India.

The Lâlâ's tact bade him follow the lead given. "I want, sahib," he said, "to be made a Rai Bâhâdur."

Now Rai Bâhâdur is an honorific title bestowed by Government for distinguished service to the State. So without more ado Shunker Dâs detailed his own virtues, totalled up the money expended in public utility, and wound up with an offer of five thousand rupees towards a new Female Hospital. The representative of British majesty drew diagrams on his blotting-paper, and remarked, casually, that he would certainly convey the Lâlâ's liberal suggestion about the hospital to the proper authorities; adding his belief that one Puras Râm, who was about to receive the coveted honour, had offered fifteen thousand for the same purpose.

"I will give ten thousand, Huzoor" bid the usurer, with a scowl struggling with his smile; "that will make