Ananda expressed his gratification at becoming acquainted with such exalted functionaries.

“Thou must know, most holy man,” resumed the king, “that need has again arisen for the exercise of fortitude and self-denial on thy part.  A powerful enemy has invaded my dominions, and has impiously presumed to discomfit my troops.  Well might I feel dismayed, were it not for the consolations of religion; but my trust is in thee, O spiritual father!  It is urgent that thou shouldst accumulate the largest amount of merit with the least delay possible.  I am unable to invoke the ministrations of thy old friends the Brahmins to this end, they being, as thou knowest, in disgrace, but I have summoned these trusty and experienced counsellors in their room.  I find them not wholly in accord.  My chief tormentor, being a man of mild temper and humane disposition, considers that it might at first suffice to employ gentle measures, such, for example, as suspending thee head downwards in the smoke of a wood fire, and filling thy nostrils with red pepper.  My chief executioner, taking, peradventure, a too professional view of the subject, deems it best to resort at once to crucifixion or impalement.  I would gladly know thy thoughts on the matter.”

Ananda expressed, as well as his terror would suffer him, his entire disapproval of both the courses recommended by the royal advisers.

“Well,” said the king, with an air of resignation, “if we cannot agree upon either, it follows that we must try both.  We will meet for that purpose to-morrow morning at the second hour.  Go in peace!”

Ananda went, but not in peace.  His alarm would have well-nigh deprived him of his faculties if he had not remembered the promise made him by his former deliverer.  On reaching a secluded spot he pronounced the mystic formula, and immediately became aware of the presence, not of a radiant Glendoveer, but of a holy man, whose head was strewn with ashes, and his body anointed with cow-dung.

“Thy occasion,” said the Fakir, “brooks no delay.  Thou must immediately accompany me, and assume the garb of a Jogi.”

Ananda rebelled excessively in his heart, for he had imbibed from the mild and sage Buddha a befitting contempt for these grotesque and cadaverous fanatics.  The emergency, however, left him no resource, and he followed his guide to a charnel house, which the latter had selected as his domicile.  There, with many lamentations over the smoothness of his hair and the brevity of his nails, the Jogi besprinkled and besmeared Ananda agreeably to his own pattern, and scored him with chalk and ochre until the peaceful apostle of the gentlest of creeds resembled a Bengal tiger.  He then hung a chaplet of infants’ skulls about his neck, placed the skull of a malefactor in one of his hands and the thigh-bone of a necromancer in the other, and at nightfall conducted him into the adjacent cemetery, where, seating him on the ashes