breaking into a kind of gallop, punctuated with shouts of
"Bravo" "Hip, hip, Hurrah" and the queer dental shriek, which our friendly
serang tells us is the peculiar note of the African reveller. But at length
Nature asserts her sway; and after the dancing has lasted almost without
interruption for three hours, the Sidi Patel, Hassan, gives permission for
a brief recess, during which he introduces to the spectators the son of the
Sidi chief Makanda,--a fine specimen of manhood whose six-foot stature
belies the fact that he is still according to Sidi views a minor incapable
of looking after his own interests. At this juncture too an itinerant
coffee-seller limps into the room with his tin can and cups and is
straightway pounced upon by the breathless performers, who apparently find
coffee better dancing-powder than any other beverage.

"How much" you ask him "do you charge per cup?"

"Saheb," comes the answer, "for two rupees you can treat the whole
gathering, men, women and children to a cup apiece; for this coffee is of
the best!" So we pay our footing in kind and bid adieu to the dancers who
are prepared to continue the revels till the early hours of the morning. As
we turn the corner into Ripon Road, we catch a final glimpse of our
bemedalled serang executing a fandango on the door-step, and of the Sidi
Patel with a cup of hot coffee in his hand shouting in broken English,
"Good-night, God Save the King!"

XIV.

A KONKAN LEGEND.

Legend and tradition have rendered many a spot in India sacrosanct for all
time; and to no tract perhaps have such traditions clung with greater
tenacity than to the western littoral which in the dawn of the centuries
watched the traders of the ancient world sail down from the horizon to
barter in its ports. As with Gujarat and the Coast of Kathiawar, so with
the Konkan it is a broken tale of strange arrivals, strange building,
strange trafficking in human and inanimate freight that greets the student
of ancient history and bewilders the ethnologist. The Konkan, in which in
earliest days "the beasts with man divided empire claimed," and which
itself is dowered with a legendary origin not wholly dissimilar in kind
from the story of Rameses III and his naval conquest, offers a fair sample
of these semi-historical myths in the tale of the arrival of the Chitpavans
at Chiplun in Ratnagiri. For, so runs the tale, on a day long buried in the
abyss of Time it chanced that a terrific sto