A light chuckle behind you, as the last words are spoken, brings you sharp round on your heels; and you discern huddled in the semi-darkness of the corner what appears in the miserable light of the cocoanut oil lamp to be a Goanese boy.  There are the short gray knickers and the thin white shirt affected by the Native Christian boy; there is the short black hair; but the skin is white, unusually white for a native of Goa, and there is something curious about the face which prompts you to ask the owner who he is and whence he comes.  The only reply is a vacant but not unpleasant smile; and the armless wastrel then volunteers the information that the child—­for she is little more—­is not a boy but a girl.  Merciful Heaven!  How comes she here amid this refuse of humanity?  “She is an orphan,” says the armless one, “and she is half-mad.  Her parents died when she was very young, and her mind became somehow weak.  There was none to take charge of her; so we of the opium-club brought her here, and in return for our support she runs errands for us and prepares the room for the nightly conclave.  She is a Mahomedan.”  You look again at the dark-eyed child smiling in the corner and you wonder what horror, what ill-treatment or what grief brought her to this pass.  Peradventure it is a mercy that her mind has gone and cannot therefore revolt against the squalor of her surroundings.  It is useless to ask her of herself; she can only smile in her scanty boyish garb.  It is the saddest sight in this valley of the abyss, where men purchase draughts of nepenthe to fortify themselves against the cares that the day brings.  The opium-club kills religion, kills nationality.  In this case it has killed sex also!

[Illustration:  A “Madak-Khana.”]

IV.

The birthplace of Shivaji.

About half a mile westward of the town of Junnar there rises from the plain a colossal hill, the lower portion whereof consists of steep slopes covered with rough grass and a few trees, and the upper part of two nearly perpendicular tiers of scarped rock, surmounted by an undulating and triangular-shaped summit.  The upper tier commences at a height of six hundred feet from the level of the plain and, rising another 200 feet, extends dark and repellant round the entire circumference of the hill.  Viewed from the outskirts of the town, the upper scarp, which runs straight to a point in the north, bears the strongest similarity to the side of a huge battleship, riding over billows long since petrified and grass grown:  and the similarity is accentuated by the presence in both scarps of a line of small Buddhist cells, the apertures of which are visible at a considerable distance and appear like the portholes or gun-ports of the fossilised vessel.  Unless one has a predilection for pushing one’s way through a perpendicular jungle or crawling over jagged and sunbaked rock, the only way