In good old days--days within living memory--there had been desperate outbreaks, dacoities, and murders, attended with the usual sequel: hanging or imprisonment beyond the seas. Now, in more civilized times (although the vital question of the well by the temple was yet in abeyance, passed on from collector to collector), the rival factions were content with pounding each other’s cattle, burning each other’s fodder, and blackening each other’s characters. Both had a large following of tenants, relations, parasites; and he who brought tidings that evil had befallen the enemy was a truly welcome guest! When the great men met, they simply scowled and passed on their way, and their women-folk laid every sin to the charge of their neighbours that it is possible for the depraved imagination of a practised native slanderer to conceive. Golab Rai Sing was the richer of the two zemindars, though Durga Pershad owned a larger extent of ground; but it was whispered that he had lost much money in a law-suit, and that Muttra Dass (the soucar) held a mortgage on his best crops; nevertheless, he carried his head high, and his wife had real silver tyres to the wheels of her ekka! It was the first moon in the new year, and the collector’s camp was pitched under the mango tope, between the village and the river; he had but recently returned from two years’ furlough, and from the whirl of politics and the turmoil of life at high pressure; also, he was new to the district. As he stood meditating on the river bank at dawn, and saw the snows rise on the horizon with the sun, watched the strings of cattle soberly threading their way to pasture, heard the doves cooing in the woods, and the rippling of the river through the water plants, he said to himself, “Here at least is rest and peace.” Casting his eyes toward the red-roofed houses, half concealed among bananas and cachar trees,--with their exquisite purple flowers-- “I am not sure that these people have not six to four the best of it,” he remarked aloud (no one but his dog received this startling confidence), as he gazed enviously at a group of lean brown Brahmins who were dipping piously in the Kanāt, and pouring water from their brass lotahs; he thought of his own tailor’s and other bills, his wife’s insane extravagance, her flirtations, his hard work, his years of enforced exile. “Yes,” he continued, “_we_ know nothing about it. We wear ourselves out running after phantoms. Here is contentment, assurance of future happiness, and present peace.” But then, you see, he was a new man--a visionary--and was totally ignorant of the internal condition of this picturesque and primitive hamlet.