I am more reconciled to my fate when Atma is in the garden, he is something human to look at and to consider, and he moves with such calm wisdom among the plants. He has a short black curling beard that grows almost up to his high cheek-bones, and soft round brown eyes full of guileless cunning, and a wide and pleasant smile. He is just a gentle hill-man and by religion a gardener, but with his turban twisted low and flat over his ears he might be any of the Old Testament characters one remembers in the pictured Bible stories of one’s childhood. Something primitive and natural about him binds him closely to Adam in my mind. It was with this simplicity and patience, I am sure, that the original cultivator tied up his banksias and saved his portulaca and mignonette after the fall, when he had something to do beside come to his meals. I am not the only person; everybody to whom it is pointed out notices at once how remarkably Atma takes after the father of us all. I have often wished to call him Adam because of his so peculiarly deserving it; but Tiglath-Pileser says that profane persons, knowing that he could not have received the name at his baptism, might laugh and thus hurt his feelings. So he is Atma still. It is near enough. He is also patriarchal in his ideas. This morning he came to us upon the business of Sropo. Sropo, he said, wished for six days’ leave in order to marry himself. “But,” said I, “this is not at all proper. Sropo went away last year to marry himself. How shall Sropo have two wives?” “Nā,” replied Atma, with his kindly smile, “that was Masuddi. Masuddi has now a wife and a son has been,[1] and his wages are so much the less. Also without doubt this Sropo could not have two wives.” “Certainly not,” said Tiglath-Pileser, virtuously. “Sropo is of my village,” Atma explained, genially, “and we folk are all poor men. More than one wife cannot be taken. But if we were rich like the Presence,” he went on, gravely, “we would have five or six.” Tiglath-Pileser shook his head. “You would be sorry,” said he. “It would be a mistake,” but only I saw the ambiguity in his eye. “It is not your Honour’s custom,” returned Atma, simply. “Sropo, then, will go?” “Call Masuddi,” said Tiglath-Pileser. “It is a serious matter, this of wives.” Round the corner of the verandah came Masuddi, shy and broadly smiling, with an end of his cotton shirt in the corner of his mouth and pulling at it, as other kinds of children pull at their pinafores. “Masuddi,” said Tiglath-Pileser, “last year you made a marriage in your house, and now you have a son. Er--which young woman did you marry?” Masuddi’s smile broadened; he cast down his eyes and scrabbled the gravel about with his foot. “Tuktoo,” he said shamefacedly. “Well, there is no harm in that. What is the name of your son?”