from the palm-branches and touched me with his hand, and breathed upon my lips the cool breath of the outer firmament, and departed.  Then I awoke and saw him again in his place far down the horizon, and he was alone, for the dawn was in the sky and the lesser lights were extinguished.  And I rose from the stony stairway that seemed like a bed of flowers for the hopeful dream, and I turned westward, and praised Allah, and went my way.

“The sun being up, all was life, and the life in me spoke of a most capacious appetite.  So I cast about for a shop where I might buy a little food with my few coppers, and seeing a confectioner spreading out his wares, I went near and took stock of the queer balls of flour and sugar, and strange oily-looking sweetmeats.  Having selected what I thought would be within my modest means, I addressed the shopkeeper to call his attention, though I knew he would not understand me, and I touched with my hand the article I wanted, showing with the other some of the small coins I had.  As soon as I touched the sweetmeats the man became very angry, and bounding from his seat called his neighbours together, and they all shouted and screamed at me, and called a man I thought to be a soldier, though he looked more like an ape in his long loose trousers of dirty black, and his untidy red turban, under which cumbrous garments his thin and stunted frame seemed even blacker and more contemptible than nature had made them.  I afterwards discovered him to be one of the Bombay police.  He seized me by the arm, and I, knowing I had done no wrong, and curious to discover, if possible, what the trouble was, accompanied him whither he led me.  After waiting many hours in a kind of little shed where there were more policemen, I was brought before an Englishman.  Of course all attempts at explanation were useless.  I could speak not a word of anything but Arabic and Persian, and no one present understood either.  At last, when I was in despair, trying to muster a few words of Greek I had learned in Istamboul, and failing signally therein, an old man with a long beard looked curiously in at the door of the crowded court.  Some instinct told me to appeal to him, and I addressed him in Arabic.  To my infinite relief he replied in that tongue, and volunteered to be interpreter.  In a few moments I learned that my crime was that I had touched the sweetmeats on the counter.

“In India, as you who have lived here doubtless know, it is a criminal offence, punishable by fine or imprisonment, for a non-Hindu person to defile the food of even the lowest caste man.  To touch one sweetmeat in a trayful defiles the whole baking, rendering it all unfit for the use of any Hindu, no matter how mean.  Knowing nothing of caste and its prejudices, it was with the greatest difficulty that the moolah, who was trying to help me out of my trouble, could make me comprehend wherein my wrong-doing lay, and that the English courts, being