laboriously.

"Nay! they are here, and more; let me count again. Surely, there are thirty-and-two, and when the canal sahib gave me his last year there were but thirty-and-one. Thirty-and-one, no more."

He sat down on the door-step, shifting the papers through his awkward hands, with the uncertain eyes of one who, being unable to read, has to seek recognition through more devious ways. His mother, meanwhile, utterly indifferent, had turned to some household occupation.

"See, there is a new one; that one, may be; 'tis cleaner than the rest," he muttered to himself, opening up the folded sheet conspicuous by its whiteness.

It was written in the Nagari character, and his puzzled face cleared at the sight.

"'Tis all right, mother!" he exclaimed; "there are but thirty one. The other is a letter."

He was about to add a suggestion that Veru might have written it, but checked himself, from fear of starting another tirade against the dead woman.

"A letter!" echoed his mother, contemptuously. "Throw it in the fire! I have no patience with folk who find their tongues too short to touch friend or foe."

"But, mother," returned Gunesh, with a smile, "even thy tongue is not long enough to reach over the world."

"And wherefore should I try? I tell thee, Guneshwa, that we peasant-folk have naught to do with the world. What he can touch with his hands is a man's portion till he dies, and 'tis theft to go beyond. Writing is no good except for certificates. There is Devi Ditta's house thrown into grief, just as the boy's betrothal began, by the news of his father being killed in Burma. God knows where Burma is. Far enough, may be, to keep the news back till a more convenient time, if it came as God meant it to come. And the man is dead, anyhow."

But Gunesh Chund refolded the paper and placed it in his waistband. His friend the accountant could tell him its purport.

"The chills again?" asked his mother, with no anxiety in her voice, when, coming back from Devi Ditta's house with a throat rendered hoarse by neighbourly lamentations, she found her son huddled up under his quilt. "You must get the sahib's white powder. For a wonder, it does good."

"Quinine will not cure me, mother," he replied in a curiously 

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