as they were born.[5] When Krishna was seven days old, he sent a nurse, with poison on her nipple, to destroy him likewise; but his highness gave such a pull at it, that the nurse dropped down dead.  In falling, she resumed her real shape of a she-demon, and her body covered no less than six square miles, and it took several thousand men to cut her up and burn her, to prevent the pestilence that must have followed.  His uncle then sent a crane, which caught up his highness, who always looked very small for his age, and swallowed him as he would swallow a frog.  But his highness kicked up such a rumpus in the bird’s stomach that he was immediately thrown up again.  When he was seven years old his uncle invited him to a feast, and got the largest and most ferocious elephant in India to tread him to death as he alighted at the door.  His highness, though then not higher than my waist, took the enormous beast by one tusk, and, after whirling him round in the air with one hand half a dozen times, he dashed him on the ground and killed him.[6] Unable any longer to stand the wickedness of his uncle, he seized him by the beard, dragged him from his throne, and dashed him to the ground in the same manner.’

I thought of poor old Father Gregory and the mustard-seeds again, and told my rich old friend that it all appeared to us indeed passing strange.

The orthodox belief among the Muhammadans is that Moses was sixty yards high; that he carried a mace sixty yards long; and that he sprang sixty yards from the ground when he aimed the fatal blow at the giant Uj, the son of Anak, who came from the land of Canaan, with a mountain on his back, to crush the army of Israelites.  Still, the head of his mace could reach only to the ankle-bone of the giant.  This was broken with the blow.  The giant fell, and was crushed under the weight of his own mountain.  Now a person whose ankle-bone was one hundred and eighty yards high must have been almost as prodigious as he who carried the fragment of the Himalaya upon his back; and he who believes in the one cannot fairly find fault with his neighbour for believing in the other.[7] I was one day talking with a very sensible and respectable Hindoo gentleman of Bundelkhand about the accident which made Hanuman drop this fragment of his load at Govardhan.  ’All doubts upon that point,’ said the old gentleman, ’have been put at rest by holy writ.  It is related in our scriptures.

’Bharat, the brother of Rama, was left regent of the kingdom of Ajodhya,[8] during his absence at the conquest of Ceylon.  He happened at night to see Hanuman passing with the mountain upon his back, and thinking he might be one of the king of Ceylon’s demons about mischief, he let fly one of his blunt arrows at him.  It hit him on the leg, and he fell, mountain and all, to the ground.  As he fell, he called out in his agony, ‘Ram, Ram’, from which Bharat discovered his mistake.  He went up, raised him in his arms, and with his kind