feel it stream through my veins again. And yet, to me he was not a god,
he was only a Taj. The thrill was not my thrill, but had come to me
secondhand from those invisible millions of believers. By a hand-shake
with their god I had ground-circuited their wire and got their monster
battery's whole charge.

He was tall and slender, indeed emaciated. He had a clean cut and
conspicuously intellectual face, and a deep and kindly eye. He looked
many years older than he really was, but much study and meditation and
fasting and prayer, with the arid life he had led as hermit and beggar,
could account for that. He is wholly nude when he receives natives, of
whatever rank they may be, but he had white cloth around his loins now, a
concession to Mr. Parker's Europe prejudices, no doubt.

As soon as I had sobered down a little we got along very well together,
and I found him a most pleasant and friendly deity. He had heard a deal
about Chicago, and showed a quite remarkable interest in it, for a god.
It all came of the World's Fair and the Congress of Religions. If India
knows about nothing else American, she knows about those, and will keep
them in mind one while.

He proposed an exchange of autographs, a delicate attention which made me
believe in him, but I had been having my doubts before. He wrote his in
his book, and I have a reverent regard for that book, though the words
run from right to left, and so I can't read it. It was a mistake to
print in that way. It contains his voluminous comments on the Hindoo
holy writings, and if I could make them out I would try for perfection
myself. I gave him a copy of Huckleberry Finn. I thought it might rest
him up a little to mix it in along with his meditations on Brahma, for he
looked tired, and I knew that if it didn't do him any good it wouldn't do
him any harm.

He has a scholar meditating under him--Mina Bahadur Rana--but we did not
see him. He wears clothes and is very imperfect. He has written a
little pamphlet about his master, and I have that. It contains a
wood-cut of the master and himself seated on a rug in the garden. The
portrait of the master is very good indeed. The posture is exactly that
which Brahma himself affects, and it requires long arms and limber legs,
and can be accumulated only by gods and the india-rubber man. There is a
life-size marble relief of Shri 108, S.B.S. in the garden. It
represents him in this same posture.

Dear me! It