Kota stirred uneasily. “Hark!” she said, listening, “what do they sing there without:—what song?” Somewhere in the village a chant was sounding, the words as yet indistinct, but becoming gradually louder, till a little procession passed Gokarna’s house, uttering these words, over their heavy and sorrowful burden: “Call on Rama! Call to Rama! Oh, my Brothers, call on Rama! For this dead Whom we bring, Call aloud to mighty Rama!” “Rama!” echoed Kota, tremulously. “God of death!—Alas! Alas! That is the omen.” “It is surely an evil omen that a funeral should pass the house of the new-born. Yet Rama is a god. He must be honored. Let the secret name of the child be ‘Ramasarman.’ There are the four, holy Brahmanic syllables. ‘Ramasarman.’ Say it with me, Kota.” And the mother, with tears in her eyes and in her voice, repeated with her husband the words that gave her first-born a secret name of death. And when this ceremony was over, receiving the baby once more into her arms, she wept over it, quietly and persistently, throughout the afternoon. CHAPTER II OMAN THE CHILD It was thus that the child of the head-man and high priest of Bul-Ruknu entered the world and found his place there. But his subsequent baby days did not bear out the dreary omens of the first. The whole town, and a throng of farmers from the rice-fields to the north, were present at the ceremony of the public christening of the child, who was named Oman, and was thenceforward regarded by the village as their prospective head and ruler. As such he became at once an important little person, both in the community and in his father’s house. Having been born a Brahman, Oman’s first year was punctuated with ceremonies prescribed for every minutest change in his little existence. In his sixth month, at the first feeding with solid food, upon which the character of his future career was supposed to depend, he was given, not rice, to bring him splendor; nor beef, to bring him power; nor fish, to bring him swiftness; nor goat’s flesh, for a fine physique; but a bit of white partridge breast, which is said to confer upon a child the gift of mental purity. And from this time on, every step in his education was for the purpose of making him a worthy successor to his ascetic father. From his earliest babyhood he was trained in rigorous ways of propriety and grave conduct. Much speech, inarticulate or otherwise, was not sanctioned in Gokarna’s presence; nor did the father sympathetically regard the manufacture of mud-pies, or even the jingling of Kota’s ankle-bells and bracelets. The delights of babyhood were indulged in secret, at times when Kota’s warm-hearted motherhood overcame the unceasing dread of her husband; and she and the baby found amusements that delighted them equally.