the army with a view to original research, but when the Mutiny broke out he set aside all else and fought it through like the man he was. Now that peace had come again, and all was quiet along the upper waters of the Jumna, he longed to be off to ransack old monasteries and discover to the world their hidden treasures. His superiors thought it meant a stroll up the valley for a few days, to get a look at native life in the rough, so they had granted him leave of absence on the nominal plea of scientific research.

Malden's ideal was a dual one: first, to become a specialist in Oriental literature, a discoverer of hidden literary treasure, and, second, to win the hand, as he had won the love, of Elsie Farnham, a chestnuthaired, blue-eyed girl in a quiet Yorkshire village. Meanwhile Bardur-din was disconsolately rummaging among chests and closets in search of the few absolute necessaries of what he believed to be a suicidal journey. It would not have been so bad had he been allowed to accompany his young master, but the refusal had been peremptory.

Malden had acquired a smattering of a few of the hill-tribe tongues, and he determined that the open geniality of his nature must do the rest. He felt sure that on the upper waters of the Jumna there must be monasteries where manuscripts that were worth their weight in diamonds lay hidden away in forgotten corners. He would hunt them out, buy them for a song, and startle the literary world with priceless histories, poems, liturgies, which should make his name famous among Oriental scholars. If there was anything probable, it was that his task was hopeless and dangerous; yet just such a one blind Fortune might use to show the futility of probabilities.

He was surprised that the farewells of his messmates were so serious, and still more surprised when Bardur-din, following him to the extreme limits of cantonments, bade him farewell with the words:

will watch the Jumna for the sign." Malden's straightforward Anglo-Saxon nature had little in common with the mysticism of the East, and this oracular utterance had no ominous meaning for him, was no presage of swift-coming terror, of ultimate deliverance.

During the first week of his absence the mess-room of the Lancers rang with jokes

at the expense of the literary Don Quixote. During the second week there was much quiet talk on the part of those who had lost wagers, three to one, that he would be back before the seventh day had passed. During the third week there were many thoughtful brows, and men counted the hours which should terminate their comrade's furlough. And Bardur-din would start to speak, stop, lick his dry lips, and try again, but dared not tell why it was that for five days and nights his head had never touched his mother earth in slumber.

Within an hour of the expiration of the furlough, swift messengers were despatched in various directions. Bardur-din, like a hound unleashed, sped up the valley with a dozen good men at his back. After a week's fruitless search the greater number gave him up for dead. Large offers of reward could bring no traces of him beyond a certain small village among the hills. Bardur-din, hearing a rumor that he had asked his way to a monastery far up the mountain's side, had made his way thither, but was coldly informed that nothing had been seen of the young man ; and as the monastery was known to contain no books, he was compelled to give up in despair. The Ninth Yorkshire Lancers succumbed to the inevitable, and, with uncovered heads, stood while the sad fact was recorded on the roll of the regiment that James Malden, subaltern, had disappeared and was presumably dead. The colonel wrote the sad news home-news which bowed a chestnut-crowned head and dimmed a pair of blue eyes in a little village in Yorkshire.

But what indeed had become of the young officer? On that eventful morning when Bardur-din sorrowfully watched him out of sight, he sprang up the path like a wild animal released from a cage. He thought the goal was almost reached, when, in fact, the race was but just begun.

The first night he slept in a village inn, with all its concomitants of wrangling children, mangy dogs, and smells innumerable; but comfort was one of the things he had sacrificed on the altar of his ambition, and he gloried in these things as the fakir glories in the spikes on which he impales himself. The next day found him roaming about a picturesque old temple. which seemed to be one with the cliff be

neath which it rested, so legibly had time written its wrinkles upon them both. The priests listened patiently to his broken questions, and answered them all with the Oriental "yes," which means nothing-or less. He found there only some few reprints of the commoner chants, and forthwith fled up the valley, leaving the priests in mild wonder, which turned to a gentle ripple of amusement as one of them tapped his head and said knowingly, "The gods protect such.”

Four days later the jaws of the Himalayas closed upon him as he entered the cañons of the Jumna, where the path hung between heaven and earth, and all the horizontal lines of nature are turned to perpendicular. He had ransacked temples without number, had turned the pages of a hundred books with as thirsty an eye as the miser's when he turns the sod to find whether his treasure is still safe, but he had been disappointed at every turn. He was beginning to learn the value of the Oriental" yes." It was being slowly forced in upon his consciousness that here in the shadow of the Himalayas man is nothing; that the long evening shadows of the mountain-peaks, the voice of the Jumna, the silent caravan of the zodiac, are the only real things, and that man is a mere excrescence on the face of nature. His eye showed all its wonted fixedness of purpose, but it had quieted to a steady glow, and no longer burned with the quick flame of immediate expectation. Night brought him. to a little hamlet where the eye acknowledged no north or south, no east or west, but where zenith and nadir seemed the only tutelar deities of the place. Here he found a simpler folk, who apparently were anxious to please him. Yes, there were monasteries, but they were all farther down the valley, and he had doubtless visited them all. As the little company of peasants crouched before him and the single guttering light threw its wavering beam upon their mobile features, he thought he detected the semblance of excitement in their faces, for now and again they threw quick questioning glances at one another, as if there were a secret understanding between them. When they had retired, he put his hand on his host's shoulder, while the straight Anglo-Saxon eye shot through his subterfuge like the sun through a morning mist.

"What is it? What does it mean? said the young man, slowly and authoritatively.

"Oh," groaned the native, "let the young master only take his eye from me and I will tell him everything. Who am I that I should keep back what my lord has already divined? We are poor simple folk and did not suppose that my lord could read our hearts like a scroll. There is a monastery whose name we dare not speak aloud, so sacred are its inmates. They are not of us"; and he swept out his arm in a gesture which included the mountainpeaks, the sky beyond, and the Jumna. roaring in its bed, as if to say, "They are like these-elemental, reverend." Then lowering his tone to a husky whisper and glancing about for fear of espial, he said: "It is the monastery of Delgar Varg, and it clings to the mountain's side so high that the eagle dares not soar to it. They have no books there, it is said, but now and again I meet them as I go to gather wood on the upper spurs, and they are always repeating words of strange sound and accent, as if the gods had come down and taught them."

The young man said:

"Listen to me. Put me on the sure road to this monastery before the day has dawned, and let none of your fellows know. They will think I have gone back."

Before that compelling eye there was no choice but to consent, and long before the western peaks were ready to greet the rising sun, Malden was far on his way toward the Delgar Varg-up beyond the tree-line, up beyond all vegetation, until, although beneath a tropic sun, he trod on the margin of eternal snow. He panted for breath; his head seemed full to bursting. The rarity of the air oppressed and yet intoxicated him. Far beneath him, so far that he dared not look, sounded the voice of the Jumna, and with singular irrelevancy the parting words of Bardur-din flashed across his memory: "I will watch the Jumna for the sign."

He was still puzzling over this enigma when he rounded a point of rock and saw before him the walls of the sacred monastery. Grim, forbidding, rough, they offered no comfort to the eye and promised none to the body. But here body was reduced to the minimum; here, if anywhere, the world was eliminated, and the soul