The _munshis_ and the vakils and the runners had departed after seeing that the Englishman was safe for the night, so the freedom of the little gathering on the bund was unrestrained. The _chowkidar_ came out of his cave into the firelight. Warm wood ashes, by the way, like Epp’s cocoa, are “grateful and comforting” to cold toes. He took a fish and incontinently choked, for he was a feeble old man. Set right again, he launched into a very long and quite unintelligible story while the sepoys said reverently:--“He is an old man and remembers many things.” As he babbled, the night shut in upon the lake and the valley of Boondi. The last cows were driven into the water for their evening drink, the waterfowl and the monkeys went to bed, and the stars came out and made a new firmament in the untroubled bosom of the lake. The light of the fire showed the ruled line of the bund springing out of the soft darkness of the wooded hill on the left and disappearing into the solid darkness of the bare hill on the right. Below the bund a man cried aloud to keep wandering pigs from the gardens whose tree-tops rose to a level with the bund-edge. Beyond the trees all was swaddled in gloom. When the gentle buzz of the unseen city died out, it seemed as though the bund were the very Swordwide Bridge that runs, as every one knows, between this world and the next. The water lapped and muttered, and now and again a fish jumped, with the shatter of broken glass, blurring the peace of the reflected heavens. “And duller should I be than some fat weed That rots itself at ease on Lethe’s wharf.” The poet who wrote those lines knew nothing whatever of Lethe’s wharf. The Englishman had found it, and it seemed to him, at that hour and in that place, that it would be good and desirable never to return to the Commissioners and the Deputy Commissioners any more, but to lie at ease on the warm sunlit bund by day, and, at night, near a shadow-breeding fire, to listen for the strangled voices and whispers of the darkness in the hills; thus after as long a life as the _chowkidar’s_, dying easily and pleasantly, and being buried in a red tomb on the borders of the lake. Surely no one would come to reclaim him, across those weary, weary miles of rock-strewn road.... “And this,” said the _chowkidar_, raising his voice to enforce attention, “is true talk. Everybody knows it, and now the Sahib knows it. I am an old man.” He fell asleep at once, with his hand on the _chillam_ that was doing duty for a whole _hukka_ among the company. He had been talking for nearly a quarter of an hour.