d that chaplets of faded flowers lie before it. But the old Malee
approaches with a meek salaam and a posy of jasmine and marigolds and
warns him that there is a cobra in the shrine.

XIII

THE PANTHER I DID NOT SHOOT

It was January 13 of a good many years ago, in those happy days that
have "gone glimmering through the dream of things that were." The sun
had scarcely risen, and I was sitting in the cosy cabin of my yacht
enjoying my "chota hazree," which, being interpreted, means "lesser
presence," and in Anglo-Indian speech signifies an "eye-opener" of tea
and toast--the greater presence appears some hours later and we call it
breakfast. I will not say that the view from my cabin windows was
enchanting. The placid waters of the broad creek would have been
pleasant to look upon if the level rays of the sun in his strength had
not skimmed them with such a blinding glare, but the low, flat-topped
hills that bounded them were forbidding.

The people said truly that God had made this a country of stones, but
they forgot that He had clothed the stones with trees of evergreen
foliage and a dense undergrowth of shrubs and grass, to protect and hold
together the thick bed of loam which the fallen leaves enriched from
year to year. It was the axes of their fathers that felled the trees,
to sell for fuel, and the billhooks of their mothers that hacked away
the bushes and grubbed up their very roots to burn on the household
cooking hole. Then the torrential rains of the south-west monsoon came
down on the naked, defenceless, parched and cracked soil and swept it in
muddy cascades down to the sea, leaving flats of bare rock, strewn thick
with round stones, sore to the best-shod foot of man and cruel to the
hoofs of a horse. About and among the huts of the unswept and malodorous
hamlet just above the shore there were fine trees, mango, tamarind,
babool and bor, showing what might have been elsewhere.

On the rounded top of the highest hill frowned in black ruin an old
Mahratta fort, covered on the top and sides and choked within by that
dense mass of struggling vegetation which always takes possession of old
forts in India. The weather-worn stones and crumbling mortar seem to
feed the trees to gluttony. First some bird-drops the seeds of the
banian fig into crevices of the ramparts, and its insidious roots push
their way and grow and grow into great tortuous snakes, embracing the
massive blocks of basalt, heaving them