Meanwhile, reverent eyes turned to the bottle-stoppers, and one or two hands wandered to the little hoard set aside for regeneration, which was diminishing so rapidly under the claims of chaplets, lights, caste-markings, sprinkling, and miracles. "There be too many, I say," reiterated a radical seller of drugs. "If the _Sirkar_ puts a tax on my medicine for the body, why not on thine for the soul?" "Nay, _pinsari-jee!_" chuckled the privileged wit and gossip of the bazaar, a cobbler who sat--by reason of his low caste--at a decent distance even from the crowd of customers which was awaiting a patch on the coverings of feet already worn and weary with their search after righteousness; "'tis a miracle when folk buy of you; and that comes not too often." Even the pilgrims laughed; for laughter at a ready gibe comes easily in India. Yet they, too, felt inclined to agree with the drug-seller. One can get _blasé_ even in miracles. Therefore, naturally enough, when there was a choice, they chose the newest ones. And the newest of all was _jogi_ Gorakh-nâth's promise of defying tampions, and locks, and chains, and, as in other years, blessing the crowd of worshippers from his self-inflicted penitentiary, inside the "_Teacher of Religion_." And what was more, he had kept his promise. That very dawn, as a kind of walk over the course, he had performed the miracle before a select band of pilgrims, mostly _jogies_ of his own sect who were now engaged in telling the tale to all and sundry in the city. What had occurred was briefly this. He had received his followers squatted on the stone steps in front of the gun, and had treated them to a dissertation on the mysteries of Yoga. Other less eminent practitioners in the art of miracles, he said, might have found it necessary to withhold the sight of the sacred person from devoted eyes. He, however, meant to show them his absolute independence of the body. He would leave it lying there, dead, while his soul went inside the gun, and blessed the pious ones. Accordingly his jaw had dropped; he had become rigid, callous apparently to the prickings of pins with which his assistants strove to make him wince, and, just as one of them withdrew a dagger, covered, of course, with gore from his very heart, a muffled voice of blessing had come from the very bowels of the gun. If that was not a miracle, what was?