The Miracle of Purun Bhagat
The night we felt the earth would move,
We stole and plucked him by the hand,
Because we loved him with the love
That knows but cannot understand.
And when the roaring hillside broke,
And all our world fell down in rain,
We saved him, we the Little Folk;
But lo! he does not come again!
Mourn now, we saved him for the sake
Of such poor love as wild ones may.
Mourn ye! Our brother will not wake,
And his own kind drive us away!
--Dirge of the Langurs
There was once a man in India who was Prime Minister of one of
the semi-independent native States in the northwestern part of
the country. He was a Brahmin, so high caste that caste ceased to
have any particular meaning for him; and his father had been an
important official in the gay-coloured tag-rag and bobtail of an
old-fashioned Hindu Court. But as Purun Dass grew up he felt that
the old order of things was changing, and that if any one wished
to get on in the world he must stand well with the English, and
imitate all that the English believed to be good. At the same
time a native official must keep his own master's favour. This
was a difficult game, but the quiet, close-mouthed young Brahmin,
helped by a good English education at a Bombay University, played
it coolly, and rose, step by step, to be Prime Minister of the
kingdom. That is to say, he held more real power than his master,
the Maharajah.
When the old king--who was suspicious of the English, their
railways and telegraphs--died, Purun Dass stood high with his
young successor, who had been tutored by an Englishman; and
between them, though he always took care that his master should
have the credit, they established schools for little girls, made
roads, and started State dispensaries and shows of agricultural
implements, and published a yearly blue-book on the 'Moral and
Material Progress of the State,' and the Foreign Office and the
Government of India were delighted. Very few native States take
up English progress altogether, for they will not believe, as
Purun Dass showed he did, that what was good for the Englishman
must be twice as good for the Asiatic. The Prime Minister became
the honoured friend of Viceroys, and Governors, and Lieutenant-
Governors, and medical missionaries, and common missionaries, and
hard-riding English officers who came to shoot in the State
preserves, as well as of whole hosts of tourists who travelled up
and down India in the cold weather, showing how things ought to
be managed. In his spare time he would endow scholarships for the
study of medicine and manufactures on strictly English lines, and
write letters to the Pioneer, the greatest Indian daily paper,
explaining his master's aims and objects.
At last he went to England on a visit, and had to pay enormous
sums to the priests when he came back; for even so high-caste a
Brahmin as Purun Dass lost caste by crossing the black sea. In
London he met and talked with every one worth knowing--men whose
names go all over the world--and saw a great deal more than he
said. He was given honourary degrees by learned universities, and
he made speeches and talked of Hindu social reform to English
ladies in evening dress, till all London cried, 'This is the most
fascinating man we have ever met at dinner since cloths were
first laid.'
When he returned to India there was a blaze of glory, for the
Viceroy himself made a special visit to confer upon the Maharajah
the Grand Cross of the Star of India--all diamonds and ribbons
and enamel; and at the same ceremony, while the cannon boomed,
Purun Dass was made a Knight Commander of the 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 sunbaked 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 these 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
goodwill 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 Pair, 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 upstream 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 across bare, grassy hill-shoulders
where the sun strikes like a burning glass; or turns through
dripping, dark forests where the tree-ferns dress the trunks from
head to heel, and the pheasant calls to his mate. And he met
Thibetan herdsmen with their dogs and flocks of sheep, each sheep
with a little bag of borax on his back, and wandering wood-
cutters, and cloaked and blanketed Lamas from Thibet, coming into
India on pilgrimage, and envoys of little solitary Hill states,
posting furiously on ring-streaked and piebald ponies, or the
cavalcade of a Rajah paying a visit; or else for a long, clear
day he would see nothing more than a black bear grunting and
rooting below in the valley. When he first started, the roar of
the world he had left still rang in his ears, as the roar of a
tunnel rings long after the train has passed through; but when he
had put the Mutteeanee Pass behind him that was all done, and
Purun Bhagat was alone with himself, walking, wondering, and
thinking, his eyes on the ground, and his thoughts with the
clouds.
One evening he crossed the highest pass he had met till then--it
had been a two-days' climb--and came out on a line of snow-peaks
that banded all the horizon--mountains from fifteen to twenty
thousand feet high, looking almost near enough to hit with a
stone, though they were fifty or sixty miles away. The pass was
crowned with dense, dark forest--deodar, walnut, wild cherry,
wild olive, and wild pear, but mostly deodar, which is the
Himalayan cedar; and under the shadow of the deodars stood a
deserted shrine to Kali--who is Durga, who is Sitala, who is
sometimes worshipped against the smallpox.
Purun Dass swept the stone floor clear, smiled at the grinning
statue, made himself a little mud fireplace at the back of the
shrine, spread his antelope skin on a bed of fresh pine-needles,
tucked his bairagi--his brass-handled crutch--under his armpit,
and sat down to rest.
Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean and cleared
for fifteen hundred feet, where a little village of stone-walled
houses, with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt. All
round it the tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of
patchwork on the knees of the mountain, and cows no bigger than
beetles grazed between the smooth stone circles of the threshing-
floors. Looking across the valley, the eye was deceived by the
size of things, and could not at first realize that what seemed
to be low scrub, on the opposite mountain-flank, was in truth a
forest of hundred-foot pines. Purun Bhagat saw an eagle swoop
across the gigantic hollow, but the great bird dwindled to a dot
ere it was half-way over. A few bands of scattered clouds strung
up and down the valley, catching on a shoulder of the hills, or
rising up and dying out when they were level with the head of the
pass. And 'Here shall I find peace,' said Purun Bhagat.
Now, a Hill-man makes nothing of a few hundred feet up or down,
and as soon as the villagers saw the smoke in the deserted
shrine, the village priest climbed up the terraced hillside to
welcome the stranger.
When he met Purun Bhagat's eyes--the eyes of a man used to
control thousands--he bowed to the earth, took the begging-bowl
without a word, and returned to the village saying, 'We have at
last a holy man. Never have I seen such a man. He is of the
Plains--but pale-coloured-a Brahmin of the Brahmins.' Then all
the housewives of the village said, 'Think you he will stay with
us?' and each did her best to cook the most savory meal for the
Bhagat. Hill-food is very simple, but with buckwheat and Indian
corn, and rice and red pepper, and little fish out of the stream
in the valley, and honey from the flue-like hives built in the
stone walls, and dried apricots, and turmeric, and wild ginger,
and bannocks of flour, a devout woman can make good things, and
it was a full bowl that the priest carried to the Bhagat. Was he
going to stay? asked the priest. Would he need a chela--a
disciple--to beg for him? Had he a blanket against the cold
weather? Was the food good?
Purun Bhagat ate, and thanked the giver. It was in his mind to
stay. That was sufficient, said the priest. Let the begging-bowl
be placed outside the shrine, in the hollow made by those two
twisted roots, and daily should the Bhagat be fed; for the
village felt honoured that such a man--he looked timidly into the
Bhagat's face--should tarry among them.
That day saw the end of Purun Bhagat's wanderings. He had come to
the place appointed for him--the silence and the space. After
this, time stopped, and he, sitting at the mouth of the shrine,
could not tell whether he were alive or dead; a man with control
of his limbs, or a part of the hills, and the clouds, and the
shifting rain and sunlight. He would repeat a Name softly to
himself a hundred hundred times, till, at each repetition, he
seemed to move more and more out of his body, sweeping up to the
doors of some tremendous discovery; but, just as the door was
opening, his body would drag him back, and, with grief, he felt
he was locked up again in the flesh and bones of Purun Bhagat.
Every morning the filled begging-bowl was laid silently in the
crutch of the roots outside the shrine. Sometimes the priest
brought it; sometimes a Ladakhi trader, lodging in the village,
and anxious to get merit, trudged up the path; but, more often,
it was the woman who had cooked the meal overnight; and she would
murmur, hardly above her breath: 'Speak for me before the gods,
Bhagat. Speak for such a one, the wife of so-and-so!' Now and
then some bold child would be allowed the honour, and Purun
Bhagat would hear him drop the bowl and run as fast as his little
legs could carry him, but the Bhagat never came down to the
village. It was laid out like a map at his feet. He could see the
evening gatherings, held on the circle of the threshing-floors,
because that was the only level ground; could see the wonderful
unnamed green of the young rice, the indigo blues of the Indian
corn, the dock-like patches of buckwheat, and, in its season, the
red bloom of the amaranth, whose tiny seeds, being neither grain
nor pulse, make a food that can be lawfully eaten by Hindus in
time of fasts.
When the year turned, the roofs of the huts were all little
squares of purest gold, for it was on the roofs that they laid
out their cobs of the corn to dry. Hiving and Harvest, rice-
sowing and husking, passed before his eyes, embroidered down
there on the many-sided plots of fields, and he thought of them
all, and wondered what they all led to at the long last.
Even in populated India a man cannot a day sit still before the
wild things run over him as though he were a rock; and in that
wilderness very soon the wild things, who knew Kali's Shrine
well, came back to look at the intruder. The langurs, the big
gray-whiskered monkeys of the Himalayas, were, naturally, the
first, for they are alive with curiosity; and when they had upset
the begging-bowl, and rolled it round the floor, and tried their
teeth on the brass handled crutch, and made faces at the antelope
skin, they decided that the human being who sat so still was
harmless. At evening, they would leap down from the pines, and
beg with their hands for things to eat, and then swing off in
graceful curves. They liked the warmth of the fire, too, and
huddled round it till Purun Bhagat had to push them aside to
throw on more fuel; and in the morning, as often as not, he would
find a furry ape sharing his blanket. All day long, one or other
of the tribe would sit by his side, staring out at the snows,
crooning and looking unspeakably wise and sorrowful.
After the monkeys came the barasingh, that big deer which is like
our red deer, but stronger. He wished to rub off the velvet of
his horns against the cold stones of Kali's statue, and stamped
his feet when he saw the man at the shrine. But Purun Bhagat
never moved, and, little by little, the royal stag edged up and
nuzzled his shoulder. Purun Bhagat slid one cool hand along the
hot antlers, and the touch soothed the fretted beast, who bowed
his head, and Purun Bhagat very softly rubbed and ravelled off
the velvet. Afterward, the barasingh brought his doe and fawn--
gentle things that mumbled on the holy man's blanket--or would
come alone at night, his eyes green in the fire-flicker, to take
his share of fresh walnuts. At last, the musk-deer, the shyest
and almost the smallest of the deerlets, came, too, her big
rabbity ears erect; even brindled, silent mushick-nabha must
needs find out what the light in the shrine meant, and drop out
her moose-like nose into Purun Bhagat's lap, coming and going
with the shadows of the fire. Purun Bhagat called them all 'my
brothers,' and his low call of 'Bhai! Bhai!' would draw them from
the forest at noon if they were within earshot. The Himalayan
black bear, moody and suspicious--Sona, who has the V-shaped
white mark under his chin--passed that way more than once; and
since the Bhagat showed no fear, Sona showed no anger, but
watched him, and came closer, and begged a share of the caresses,
and a dole of bread or wild berries. Often, in the still dawns,
when the Bhagat would climb to the very crest of the pass to
watch the red day walking along the peaks of the snows, he would
find Sona shuffling and grunting at his heels, thrusting a
curious fore-paw under fallen trunks, and bringing it away with a
whoof of impatience; or his early steps would wake Sona where he
lay curled up, and the great brute, rising erect, would think to
fight, till he heard the Bhagat's voice and knew his best friend.
Nearly all hermits and holy men who live apart from the big
cities have the reputation of being able to work miracles with
the wild things, but all the miracle lies in keeping still, in
never making a hasty movement, and, for a long time, at least, in
never looking directly at a visitor. The villagers saw the
outline of the barasingh stalking like a shadow through the dark
forest behind the shrine; saw the minaul, the Himalayan pheasant,
blazing in her best colours before Kali's statue; and the langurs
on their haunches, inside, playing with the walnut shells. Some
of the children, too, had heard Sona singing to himself, bear-
fashion, behind the fallen rocks, and the Bhagat's reputation as
miracle-worker stood firm.
Yet nothing was farther from his mind than miracles. He believed
that all things were one big Miracle, and when a man knows that
much he knows something to go upon. He knew for a certainty that
there was nothing great and nothing little in this world: and day
and night he strove to think out his way into the heart of
things, back to the place whence his soul had come.
So thinking, his untrimmed hair fell down about his shoulders,
the stone slab at the side of the antelope skin was dented into a
little hole by the foot of his brass-handled crutch, and the
place between the tree-trunks, where the begging-bowl rested day
after day, sunk and wore into a hollow almost as smooth as the
brown shell itself; and each beast knew his exact place at the
fire. The fields changed their colours with the seasons; the
threshing floors filled and emptied, and filled again and again;
and again and again, when winter came, the langurs frisked among
the branches feathered with light snow, till the mother-monkeys
brought their sad-eyed little babies up from the warmer valleys
with the spring. There were few changes in the village. The
priest was older, and many of the little children who used to
come with the begging-dish sent their own children now; and when
you asked of the villagers how long their holy man had lived in
Kali's Shrine at the head of the pass, they answered, 'Always.'
Then came such summer rains as had not been known in the Hills
for many seasons. Through three good months the valley was
wrapped in cloud and soaking mist--steady, unrelenting downfall,
breaking off into thunder-shower after thunder-shower. Kali's
Shrine stood above the clouds, for the most part, and there was a
whole month in which the Bhagat never caught a glimpse of his
village. It was packed away under a white floor of cloud that
swayed and shifted and rolled on itself and bulged upward, but
never broke from its piers--the streaming flanks of the valley.
All that time he heard nothing but the sound of a million little
waters, overhead from the trees, and underfoot along the ground,
soaking through the pine-needles, dripping from the tongues of
draggled fern, and spouting in newly torn muddy channels down the
slopes. Then the sun came out, and drew forth the good incense of
the deodars and the rhododendrons, and that far-off, clean smell
which the Hill people call 'the smell of the snows.' The hot
sunshine lasted for a week, and then the rains gathered together
for their last downpour, and the water fell in sheets that flayed
off the skin of the ground and leaped back in mud. Purun Bhagat
heaped his fire high that night, for he was sure his brothers
would need warmth; but never a beast came to the shrine, though
he called and called till he dropped asleep, wondering what had
happened in the woods.
It was in the black heart of the night, the rain drumming like a
thousand drums, that he was roused by a plucking at his blanket,
and, stretching out, felt the little hand of a langur. 'It is
better here than in the trees,' he said sleepily, loosening a
fold of blanket; 'take it and be warm.' The monkey caught his
hand and pulled hard. 'Is it food, then?' said Purun Bhagat.
'Wait awhile, and I will prepare some.' As he kneeled to throw
fuel on the fire the langur ran to the door of the shrine,
crooned, and ran back again, plucking at the man's knee.
'What is it? What is thy trouble, Brother?' said Purun Bhagat,
for the langur's eyes were full of things that he could not tell.
'Unless one of thy caste be in a trap--and none set traps here--I
will not go into that weather. Look, Brother, even the barasingh
comes for shelter!'
The deer's antlers clashed as he strode into the shrine, clashed
against the grinning statue of Kali. He lowered them in Purun
Bhagat's direction and stamped uneasily, hissing through his
half-shut nostrils.
'Hai! Hai! Hai!' said the Bhagat, snapping his fingers. 'Is this
payment for a night's lodging!' But the deer pushed him toward
the door, and as he did so Purun Bhagat heard the sound of
something opening with a sigh, and saw two slabs of the floor
draw away from each other, while the sticky earth below smacked
its lips.
'Now I see,' said Purun Bhagat. 'No blame to my brothers that
they did not sit by the fire to-night. The mountain is falling.
And yet--why should I go?' His eye fell on the empty begging-
bowl, and his face changed. 'They have given me good food daily
since--since I came, and, if I am not swift, to-morrow there will
not be one mouth in the valley. Indeed, I must go and warn them
below. Back there, Brother! Let me get to the fire.'
The barasingh backed unwillingly as Purun Bhagat drove a pine
torch deep into the flame, twirling it till it was well lit. 'Ah!
ye came to warn me,' he said, rising. 'Better than that we shall
do; better than that. Out, now, and lend me thy neck, Brother,
for I have but two feet.'
He clutched the bristling withers of the barasingh with his right
hand, held the torch away with his left, and stepped out of the
shrine into the desperate night. There was no breath of wind, but
the rain nearly drowned the flare as the great deer hurried down
the slope, sliding on his haunches. As soon as they were clear of
the forest more of the Bhagat's brothers joined them. He heard,
though he could not see, the langurs pressing about him, and
behind them the uhh! uhh! of Sona. The rain matted his long white
hair into ropes; the water splashed beneath his bare feet, and
his yellow robe clung to his frail old body, but he stepped down
steadily, leaning against the barasingh. He was no longer a holy
man, but Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., Prime Minister of no small
State, a man accustomed to command, going out to save life. Down
the steep, plashy path they poured all together, the Bhagat and
his brothers, down and down till the deer's feet clicked and
stumbled on the wall of a threshing-floor, and he snorted because
he smelt Man. Now they were at the head of the one crooked
village street, and the Bhagat beat with his crutch on the barred
windows of the blacksmith's house, as his torch blazed up in the
shelter of the eaves. 'Up and out!' cried Purun Bhagat; and he
did not know his own voice, for it was years since he had spoken
aloud to a man. 'The hill falls! The hill is falling! Up and out,
oh, you within!'
'It is our Bhagat,' said the blacksmith's wife. 'He stands among
his beasts. Gather the little ones and give the call.'
It ran from house to house, while the beasts, cramped in the
narrow way, surged and huddled round the Bhagat, and Sona puffed
impatiently.
The people hurried into the street--they were no more than
seventy souls all told--and in the glare of the torches they saw
their Bhagat holding back the terrified barasingh, while the
monkeys plucked piteously at his skirts, and Sona sat on his
haunches and roared.
'Across the valley and up the next hill!' shouted Purun Bhagat.
'Leave none behind! We follow!'
Then the people ran as only Hill folk can run, for they knew that
in a landslip you must climb for the highest ground across the
valley. They fled, splashing through the little river at the
bottom, and panted up the terraced fields on the far side, while
the Bhagat and his brethren followed. Up and up the opposite
mountain they climbed, calling to each other by name--the roll-
call of the village-and at their heels toiled the big barasingh,
weighted by the failing strength of Purun Bhagat. At last the
deer stopped in the shadow of a deep pine-wood, five hundred feet
up the hillside. His instinct, that had warned him of the coming
slide, told him he would be safe here.
Purun Bhagat dropped fainting by his side, for the chill of the
rain and that fierce climb were killing him; but first he called
to the scattered torches ahead, 'Stay and count your numbers';
then, whispering to the deer as he saw the lights gather in a
cluster: 'Stay with me, Brother. Stay-till--I--go!'
There was a sigh in the air that grew to a mutter, and a mutter
that grew to a roar, and a roar that passed all sense of hearing,
and the hillside on which the villagers stood was hit in the
darkness, and rocked to the blow. Then a note as steady, deep,
and true as the deep C of the organ drowned everything for
perhaps five minutes, while the very roots of the pines quivered
to it. It died away, and the sound of the rain falling on miles
of hard ground and grass changed to the muffled drum of water on
soft earth. That told its own tale.
Never a villager--not even the priest--was bold enough to speak
to the Bhagat who had saved their lives. They crouched under the
pines and waited till the day. When it came they looked across
the valley and saw that what had been forest, and terraced field,
and track-threaded grazing-ground was one raw, red, fan-shaped
smear, with a few trees flung head-down on the scarp. That red
ran high up the hill of their refuge, damming back the little
river, which had begun to spread into a brick-coloured lake. Of
the village, of the road to the shrine, of the shrine itself, and
the forest behind, there was no trace. For one mile in width and
two thousand feet in sheer depth the mountain-side had come away
bodily, planed clean from head to heel.
And the villagers, one by one, crept through the wood to pray
before their Bhagat. They saw the barasingh standing over him,
who fled when they came near, and they heard the langurs wailing
in the branches, and Sona moaning up the hill; but their Bhagat
was dead, sitting cross-legged, his back against a tree, his
crutch under his armpit, and his face turned to the north-east.
The priest said: 'Behold a miracle after a miracle, for in this
very attitude must all Sunnyasis be buried! Therefore where he
now is we will build the temple to our holy man.'
They built the temple before a year was ended--a little stone-
and-earth shrine--and they called the hill the Bhagat's Hill, and
they worship there with lights and flowers and offerings to this
day. But they do not know that the saint of their worship is the
late Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., D.C.L., Ph.D., etc., once Prime
Minister of the progressive and enlightened State of Mohiniwala,
at honourary or corresponding member of more learned and
scientific societies than will ever do any good in this world or
the next.
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