d children to play around them. All gone! by my own doing, or
undoing, call it which you will.

"And know, too, that in those days I also was a soldier"--this with a
defiant glance first at the Rajput chief and then at the Afghan general.
"At my side rattled the steel scabbard, and in my belt was the sharp
poinard, swift messenger of death when it came to hand-to-hand fighting,
and the horse I rode had its rich trappings of gold and silver. It may
all seem strange, to hear me tell those things of the long ago and to
look upon me now"--and the speaker stretched forth his skinny, twisted
fingers and attenuated arms, and for a moment ruefully contemplated
them.

"But I speak the truth," he went on, "for to-night, prompted by the
stories to which I have listened and the thoughts they have engendered,
will I unseal my lips after fifty long years of wandering alone, giving
no man my confidence, seeking no man's confidence, intent only on the
attainment of the one desire deeply seated in my heart, and which, in my
eager striving to achieve, seems to be ever more remote from
accomplishment. To-night will I reveal the story of my life, so that,
perchance, the lesson it teaches will show still more clearly the
impotence of man to constitute himself the avenger of wrongs. For if
judgment belongs to Allah, so does vengeance. And the choice of
instrument, of time and place, of the very manner of the deed--all this
belongs to God alone, as this night, listening to the stories that have
gone before, have I for the first time come fully to comprehend."

The fakir paused to gaze around his audience. The look of interest and
expectancy on each face showed the impression his impulsive flow of
language had made. No interrupting word was spoken, but every eye
remained fastened on the lean, keen face peering over long slender
shanks and hand-clasped knees. The narrator continued:

"In those days I had twenty retainers at my call, and these men I
commanded when I rode forth to service with a certain Nawab, from whom I
held my lands for the feudal service I thus performed. It was my fate to
take part in many a fight and in many a foray, and to send many a man to
his doom. But God had ordained it so; the fault was not mine.

"Well, it befell that a certain city was given over to sack and carnage,
for the word had gone forth that the only way to break the power of its
Hindu occupants was to demolish their temples, destroy their idols, and
t