"Yea!" he said, "I was forgetting. Such arrangings are meat and drink to thy sort. So take thy price. It shall be trebled if she bids me see her to-morrow, but--" here he laughed, half at himself,--"thou must needs work miracles for such favour to come so soon!" Akbar, as he capered off, the rupees jingling in his pocket, to more legitimate and less lucrative pursuits, winked and leered to himself over his own surpassing wickedness and wisdom. Miracles! Ay; but it was nature worked them, not he. Given youth, proximity, a touch of surprise, a flavour of the forbidden, and the result, in his evil experience, was sure. In the meantime his part was to keep the ball from falling until the players took to playing the game for themselves; then the fun was over for the true go-between. He had to take a back seat and watch--he! he! he!--the miracle! A pretty miracle, indeed! The idea tickled him so that he could not keep it to himself, and as he passed through the bazaar, doing his daily marketing, he used his new avocation of miracle-monger as a reason for good bargains. The shop-keepers, however, shook their heads. Miracles paid the priests, and might suit such as he, but for their part they considered that there were too many miracles in Eshwara. What was the good of the pilgrims coming at all if all their money went to the temples, and they had not a pice left for a relic, or even a toy to take home to the toddlers whose feet were not yet strong enough for pilgrimage? Whereupon they would look discontentedly round the baskets of Brummagen brass gods, the Belgian-made rosaries, the patent Swedish self-lighting joss sticks, the machine-cut oblation cups, with which almost every other shop sought to attract custom. Baskets where a pious pilgrim could purchase a whole pantheon, and secure a modicum of divine favour--all duly trade-marked by Christians--for a few farthings. "'Tis not our fault, brother," suggested a decrepit old Brahmin, with a wrinkled forehead all seamed with white markings, who--squatted in the gutter--was extolling the virtue of the sacred _sâlig râmas_, made unblushingly out of the ball stoppers of soda-water bottles, which lay exposed for sale on a handkerchief in front of him; a Manchester-made handkerchief, printed in the best style with the loves of Krishna. "We get no more than in the old days; nay, less. For, see you, the third-class ticket takes so much. And that is the _Huzoors'_ fee. They send it all over the black water to make a mountain of silver in the streets of their big city, London. Oh, pious ones! Buy! Buy a sacred sin-expeller!" The monotonous cry was caused by the appearance of a priest-led band of pilgrims; for, as yet, the great throng was not, when the whole narrow street would be a sea of heads, when even the saffron robes would be lost to sight, and the only thing visible would be the patient, anxious faces seeking redemption. That would come on the morrow,--the great day.