dozen troopers, was perforce weak. The Hindu is not naturally resistant, and the fighting men around him were not slow to recognize Hunumân's unusual show of determination.

"It is assault! it is battery! I am coerced. I claim my rights. The law is on my side!" he gasped, between his struggles.

"Smash the blasphemous thing, and let the boy go," called Azmutoollah. "Enough, Hunumân-ji. Seek thy law elsewhere--not here, in the house of my fathers."

The conch lay shivered to atoms, but the young man felt himself master of the situation. Just as the concussion of his fall had forced his breath into the conch, so the pressure of illegal coercion made his newly acquired love of freedom overflow into eloquence. Heart and head were both full to inflation with the finest sentiments. As he stood on the steps, haranguing the people, he would have done credit to the House of Commons in a party discussion.

"By the faith, he speaks well! 'Tis a pity his shoulders are so narrow," remarked a trooper, carelessly, as he strolled away to a bare, beaten patch by the tank, where a number of naked boys were standing in pairs, heads down, hands on knees, smacking their thighs, and crying "Hull-la-la!" to give themselves courage ere closing for the grip. Beneath the skeleton of a peepul-tree hard by, whence the branches had been stripped for fodder, some elders were at work over gymnastic exercises, swinging clubs, or--supported on palms and feet--touching the dust with their foreheads, and then rising again like a strung bow. The sunlight shone on their bronze sinews.

"Didst kill him?" asked one, breathlessly keeping the count of his own performance.

"Kill him? Look you, Allah Baksh--there was not enough of him to kill!"

And a chuckle ran round the assembly.

A fortnight after, when the district officer was playing whist with the policeman, the doctor, and the young assistant, who was gradually being taught that rules are occasionally more honoured in the breach than the observance, Dhunput Rai, judicial assistant, sent in to ask five minutes' leisure of the Huzoor. Every one laid down his cards at once, and the doctor lit a fresh cigar, for Dhunput Rai was one of those natives of the old school who many a time and oft have steered the British bark safely through troubled waters, as their fathers steered the alien armadas of the Mogul. He was a Brahman of the highest caste, keen-witted, 

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