his loins, muffles his haggard face
more closely than before, and with dishevelled beard, and chin sadly
sunk upon his breast, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left,
and meeting no man's gaze, wends silently homeward.

To-morrow he will take his wife and go to Bombay, to feed with
consecrated sandal-wood and oil the Sacred Flame the Magi brought from
Persia, when they were driven thence with all their people to Ormuz. But
the name of little Kirsajee will cross their lips no more; his memory is
a forbidden thing in the household; he is as if he never had been.

When Brahminee kite, and adjutant, and white-breasted crow have done
their ghoulish office on little Kirsajee, his bones shall lie bleaching
under the pitiless eye of his people's blazing god, till the rains
come, and fill the pit, and carry the waste of Gheber skeletons by
subterraneous sewers down to the sea. But the Pondicherry eagle took
the _left eye_ first; wherefore the most pious deeds of merit, to be
performed by my Parsee neighbor,--even a hospital for maimed dogs, or
feeding the Sacred Flame with great store of sandal-wood and precious
gums, or tilling the earth with a diligence equivalent to the efficacy
of ten thousand prayers,--can hardly suffice to save the soul of little
Kirsajee, the Forbidden!

* * * * *

There is a blood-feud of three months' standing between two members of
our household.

One day, Lootee, the chuprassey's cat, took Tchoop, the khansamah's
monkey, unawares, as he was sunning himself on the house-top, and with
scratching and spitting, sudden and furious, so startled him, that he
threw himself over the parapet into the crowded Cossitollah, and would
have been killed by the fall, had he not chanced to alight on the
voluminous turban of a dandy hurkaru from the Mint. As it was, one of
his arms sustained a compound fracture, and his nerves suffered so
frightful a shock, that it was only by a miracle of surgery, and the
most patient nursing, that he was ever restored to his wonted agility
and sagacity.

But the day of retribution has arrived; Lootee has had kittens. There
were five of them in the original litter; but only one remains. Tchoop
tossed two of them from the house-top when no dandy hurkaru from the
Mint was below to soften the fall; the old adjutant-bird, that for three
years has stood on one leg on the Parsee's godown, gobbled up another as
it lay choked in the south veran