oil lamp to be a
Goanese boy. There are the short gray knickers and the thin white shirt
affected by the Native Christian boy; there is the short black hair; but
the skin is white, unusually white for a native of Goa, and there is
something curious about the face which prompts you to ask the owner who he
is and whence he comes. The only reply is a vacant but not unpleasant
smile; and the armless wastrel then volunteers the information that the
child--for she is little more--is not a boy but a girl. Merciful Heaven!
How comes she here amid this refuse of humanity? "She is an orphan," says
the armless one, "and she is half-mad. Her parents died when she was very
young, and her mind became somehow weak. There was none to take charge of
her; so we of the opium-club brought her here, and in return for our
support she runs errands for us and prepares the room for the nightly
conclave. She is a Mahomedan." You look again at the dark-eyed child
smiling in the corner and you wonder what horror, what ill-treatment
or what grief brought her to this pass. Peradventure it is a mercy
that her mind has gone and cannot therefore revolt against the squalor
of her surroundings. It is useless to ask her of herself; she can only
smile in her scanty boyish garb. It is the saddest sight in this
valley of the abyss, where men purchase draughts of nepenthe to fortify
themselves against the cares that the day brings. The opium-club
kills religion, kills nationality. In this case it has killed sex also!

[Illustration: A "Madak-Khana."]

IV.

THE BIRTHPLACE OF SHIVAJI.

About half a mile westward of the town of Junnar there rises from the plain
a colossal hill, the lower portion whereof consists of steep slopes covered
with rough grass and a few trees, and the upper part of two nearly
perpendicular tiers of scarped rock, surmounted by an undulating and
triangular-shaped summit. The upper tier commences at a height of six
hundred feet from the level of the plain and, rising another 200 feet,
extends dark and repellant round the entire circumference of the hill.
Viewed from the outskirts of the town, the upper scarp, which runs straight
to a point in the north, bears the strongest similarity to the side of a
huge battleship, riding over billows long since petrified and grass grown:
and the similarity is accentuated by the presence in both scarps of a line
of small Buddhist cells, the apertures of which are visible at a
considerable dis