Page after page, syllogism after syllogism, conclusion after conclusion, I followed for the hundredth time in the book I love well--the book of him that would destroy the religion I believe, but whose brilliant failure is one of the grandest efforts of the purely human mind.

I finished a chapter and, in thought still, but conscious again of life, I looked up.

They were still down there by the well, those two, but while I looked the old priest, bent and white, came out of the little temple where he had been sprinkling his image of Vishnu, and dropped his aged limbs from one step to the other painfully, steadying his uncertain descent with a stick.

He went to the beautiful couple seated on the edge of the well, built of mud and sun-dried bricks, and he seemed to speak to Isaacs, I watched, and became interested in the question whether Isaacs would give him a two-anna bit or a copper, and whether I could distinguish with the naked eye at that distance between the silver and the baser metal.

Curious, thought I, how odd little trifles will absorb the attention.