e, and answered--"A little.
Very little, and that mostly about the army of the Greek king who is
mentioned in the writing."

We inquired what he could possibly know of this matter, whereon Kou-en
replied calmly--"In those days when the faith of the Holy One was still
young, I dwelt as a humble brother in this very monastery, which was
one of the first built, and I saw the army pass, that is all. That,"
he added meditatively, "was in my fiftieth incarnation of this present
Round--no, I am thinking of another army--in my seventy-third."[*]

[*] As students of their lives and literature will be aware,
it is common for Buddhist priests to state positively that
they remember events which occurred during their previous
incarnations.--ed.

Here Leo began a great laugh, but I managed to kick him beneath the
table and he turned it into a sneeze. This was fortunate, as such ribald
merriment would have hurt the old man's feelings terribly. After all,
also, as Leo himself had once said, surely we were not the people to
mock at the theory of re-incarnation, which, by the way, is the first
article of faith among nearly one quarter of the human race, and this
not the most foolish quarter.

"How can that be--I ask for instruction, learned One--seeing that memory
perishes with death?"

"Ah!" he answered, "Brother Holly, it may seem to do so, but oftentimes
it comes back again, especially to those who are far advanced upon the
Path. For instance, until you read this passage I had forgotten all
about that army, but now I see it passing, passing, and myself with
other monks standing by the statue of the big Buddha in front yonder,
and watching it go by. It was not a very large army, for most of the
soldiers had died, or been killed, and it was being pursued by the wild
people who lived south of us in those days, so that it was in a great
hurry to put the desert between it and them. The general of the army was
a swarthy man--I wish that I could remember his name, but I cannot.

"Well," he went on, "that general came up to the Lamasery and demanded a
sleeping place for his wife and children, also provisions and medicines,
and guides across the desert. The abbot of that day told him it was
against our law to admit a woman under our roof, to which he answered
that if we did not, we should have no roof left, for he would burn the
place and kill every one of us with the sword. Now, as you know, to be
killed by violence