n the telling of tales.

So in the day of Neela Deo, most exalted King of all elephants, came a
runner at the end of his last strength. Stripped naked, but for his
meagre loincloth, the oils of his body ran thick down all his limbs and
his splitting veins shed blood from his nostrils and from his mouth.
In the market-place he fell and with his last breaths coughed out a
broken message.

Many gathered to discover his meaning. Spread a swift excitement. The
shops were emptied, the doorways and alleys opened, and streams of
people poured out into a common tide.

Perfume dealers brought copper flasks of priceless oils. Flower
merchants gathered up their entire stock of freshly prepared garlands
of marigold and tuberose and jasmine and champak blooms--banked masses
of garlands were hung on scores of scores of reaching arms, lifted to
carry them. Sixty full pieces of white turban-cloth were caught from
the shelves of cloth sellers.

Companies and companies of nautch-girls, with their men-servants and
instruments to accompany them--even the most costly of these, who were
also singing women--poured out of the districts where the towns-women
lived and blended in their groups as individual units, in the
increasing surge that flowed out along the great Highway, like a river
which had broken its dam.

The multitude followed the great highway past the station oval and
turned aside into the open jungle--deepening, thickening, swelling,
teeming forward. Twenty thousand voices, lifted in all pitches of the
human compass, were caught by tom-toms and the impelling cadence of the
singing nautch-girls--like drift-wood in a swift current--and driven
into rhythmic pulsation.

So the people of Hurda went out to meet Neela Deo, King of all
elephants.

When the front of the throng went by his place, Hand-of-a-God enquired
of running men from his own gateway. By his side the Gul Moti stood
with Son of Power. When they understood, she pushed her chosen of all
men through the vine-made arch and he sprang away and ran with the
people.

They shared their garlands with him, that he should not come into Neela
Deo's presence with empty hands; and they exulted because he ran with
them, for the fame of Son-of-Power was already established.

At the margins of the true jungle, a high-tenor voice came out to meet
them. The feeling in it chained Skag's ear; it was like a strong man
contending bravely with his tongue, but calling on the