and fishing people is proved by the large number of words of oceanic origin which still characterize their home-speech, while according to the authority above mentioned the “Chandrakant” which they recognize is not the sweating crystal of Northern India and ancient Sanskrit lore, but a fossil coral found upon the Makran coast.  Forty years ago Rao Saheb V. N. Mandlik remarked that “the ancestors of the tribe probably came by ships either from some other port in India or from the opposite coast of Africa;” and in these later days his theory is corroborated by General Haig, who traces them back to the great marts on the Indus and thence still further back to the Persian Gulf and Egypt.  Why or at what date they left the famous country of the Pharaohs, none can say:  but that these white-skinned Brahmans are descendants of such people as the Berbers, who belonged of right to the European races, seems the most plausible theory of their origin yet put forward, and serves as an additional proof of the enormous influence exercised upon posterity by the famous country of the Nile.

Thus perhaps the legend of storm and shipwreck is not false, but records in poetic diction the arrival on these shores of men who presumably had in some degree inherited the genius of the most famous and most civilized country of prehistoric ages, and who had by long trafficking in dangerous waters and by the hardships of long migration acquired that self-reliance and love of mastery which has been bequeathed almost unchanged to their Brahmanised descendants.  The Chitpavans were indeed the children of the storm, and something of the spirit of the storm lives in them still.  Some trace is theirs of the old obstinacy which taught those pale ancestors to fight against insuperable forces until they were cast naked and broken upon the seashore.  And peradventure the secret lesson of the ancient folk-tale is this, that the God of the Axe, despite the curse, is still at hand to help them along the path to new birth, provided always that their cause is fair, that they invoke not his aid for trivial or unjust ends, and that they have been truly purified in the pyres of affliction.

XV.

NUR JAN.

  “The singer only sang the Joy of Life,
    For all too well, alas! the singer knew,
  How hard the daily toil, how keen the strife,
    How salt the falling tear, the joys how few.”

“Nay, Saheb, I accept no money for my songs from you and your friend; for you have taken a kindly interest in me and my past history, and have shewn me the respect which my birth warrants, but which alas! my occupation hath made forfeit in the eyes of the world.  But,—­if you have found satisfaction in my singing, then write somewhat of me and of my Mimi to the paper, even as you did of Imtiazan, that thus your people—­the people who know not the inner life of India may learn that I was not born amid the saringis and the bells, and that I, the singer, hide within my heart a life-long regret.”