daily unavoidable returning requisites of domestic life in all their varied ramifications, and relieve a famishing family from the jaws of penury and privation. By thus delivering me from an impending impossibility most prejudicial to my purse resources, you will confer on your humble servant a boon which will be always vivid on the tablet of my breast, never to be effaced until the period that I am sojurning on the stage of this sublunary world’s theatre.” The petition goes on to explain that all the unhappy petitioner’s efforts to earn an honest livelihood by the perspiration of his brow have been frustrated owing to the sins committed by his soul in a former birth, and ends with religious reflections and prayers. While this is presented to the Collector, the candidate stands under a tree at some distance and rehearses, with palpitating heart, the _salaam_ he will make if admitted to the august presence. Life and death seem to hang on the impression which may be produced by that _salaam_. But the cousin’s wife’s uncle’s brother-in-law sets other machinery in motion. He humbles himself and makes up an old quarrel with the Naik; he flatters the butler till that great man is pleased and promises his influence; and he wins the Sheristedar’s vote by telling him earnestly that all the district knows he is virtually the Collector and whatever he recommends is done. Nor is the _ayah_ forgotten, for the _ayah_ has access to the _madam_, and by that route certain shameful matters affecting a rival candidate will reach the _saheb_. Now, supposing that the sins of a former birth fail to checkmate all these machinations, and that the new arrival actually finds himself swimming in the unfathomed bliss of a belt with a brass plate, and a princely income of seven Queen’s rupees every month, who could foretell that almost before a year has passed he will again be floundering in the mire of disappointed ambition? Yet so it is. He hears of another _Chupprassee_ with only eleven months’ service against his twelve, who has been promoted to eight rupees, and immediately the canker of discontent eats into his heart. Later on he finds that the cup of his happiness will never be quite full until he gets ten rupees a month, and when he has reached that giddy height, he will see dawning on his horizon the strange and beautiful hope that he may be a Naik. It is a desperate ambition— “He who ascends to mountain tops shall find The highest peaks most wrapped in clouds and snow; He who surpasses or subdues mankind Must look down on the hate of those below.”