On the day following my arrival, Ushas explained to me the relationship in which we were to stand towards each other.  She said that marriage was an institution as yet unknown to them, because their organisms had not yet attained the conditions to which they were struggling.  They had progressed so far, however, that they had discovered the secret of eternal youth.  Indeed, Ushas herself was 590 years old.  I was not surprised at this, as something of the same kind has occurred more than once to rishis or very advanced mahatmas.  As a rule, however, they are too anxious to go to nirvana, to stay on earth a moment longer than necessary, and prefer rather to come back at intervals:  this, we all know, has occurred at least six times in the case of Buddha, as Mr Sinnett so well explains.  At the same time Ushas announced without words, but with a slight blush, and a smile of ineffable tenderness, that from the day of my birth she knew that I was destined to be her future husband, and that at the appointed time we should be brought together.  We now had our period of probation to go through together, and she told me that all the other chelas here were going through the necessary training preparatory to wedlock like myself, and that there would be a general marrying all round, when the long-expected culminating epoch should arrive.

Meantime, in order to enter upon the first stage of my new chela-ship, it became necessary for me to forget all the experiences which I had acquired during the last twenty years of my life, as she explained that it would be impossible for my mind to receive the new truths which I had now to learn so long as I clung to what she called “the fantasies” of my mahatma-ship.  I cannot describe the pang which this announcement produced.  Still I felt that nothing must impede my search after truth; and I could not conceal from myself that, if in winning it I also won Ushas, I was not to be pitied.  Nor to this day have I ever had reason to regret the determination at which I then arrived.

It would be impossible for me in the compass of this article to describe all my experiences in the new life to which I dedicated myself, nor indeed would it be proper to do so; suffice it to say, that I progressed beyond my Ushas’ most sanguine expectations.  And here I would remark, that I found my chief stimulus to exertion to be one which had been completely wanting in my former experience.  It consisted simply in this, that altruism had been substituted for egotism.  Formerly, I made the most herculean spiritual effort to tide myself over the great period of danger—­the middle of the fifth round.  “That,” as Mr Sinnett correctly says, “is the stupendous achievement of the adept as regards his own personal interests;” and of course our own interests were all that I or any of the other mahatmas ever thought of.  “He has reached,” pursues our author, “the farther shore of the sea in