If I had encouraged him the khansamah would have wandered all through Bengal with his corpse.

I did not go away as soon as I intended.  I stayed for the night, while the wind and the rat and the sash and the window-bolt played a ding-dong “hundred and fifty up.”  Then the wind ran out and the billiards stopped, and I felt that I had ruined my one genuine, hall-marked ghost story.

Had I only stopped at the proper time, I could have made anything out of it.

That was the bitterest thought of all!

The Sending of Dana Da

    When the Devil rides on your chest, remember the chamar.
                         _—­Native Proverb._

Once upon a time some people in India made a new heaven and a new earth out of broken teacups, a missing brooch or two, and a hair brush.  These were hidden under bushes, or stuffed into holes in the hillside, and an entire civil service of subordinate gods used to find or mend them again; and everyone said:  “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.”  Several other things happened also, but the religion never seemed to get much beyond its first manifestations; though it added an air-line postal dak, and orchestral effects in order to keep abreast of the times, and stall off competition.

This religion was too elastic for ordinary use.  It stretched itself and embraced pieces of everything that medicine men of all ages have manufactured.  It approved and stole from Freemasonry; looted the Latter-day Rosicrucians of half their pet words; took any fragments of Egyptian philosophy that it found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; annexed as many of the Vedas as had been translated into French or English, and talked of all the rest; built in the German versions of what is left of the Zend Avesta; encouraged white, gray, and black magic, including Spiritualism, palmistry, fortune-telling by cards, hot chestnuts, double-kerneled nuts and tallow droppings; would have adopted Voodoo and Oboe had it known anything about them, and showed itself, in every way, one of the most accommodating arrangements that had ever been invented since the birth of the sea.

When it was in thorough working order, with all the machinery down to the subscriptions complete, Dana Da came from nowhere, with nothing in his hands, and wrote a chapter in its history which has hitherto been unpublished.  He said that his first name was Dana, and his second was Da.  Now, setting aside Dana of the New York Sun, Dana is a Bhil name, and Da fits no native of India unless you accept the Bengali De as the original spelling.  Da is Lap or Finnish; and Dana Da was neither Finn, Chin, Bhil, Bengali, Lap, Nair, Gond, Romaney, Magh, Bokhariot, Kurd, Armenian, Levantine, Jew, Persian, Punjabi, Madrasi, Parsee, nor anything else known to ethnologists.  He was simply Dana Da, and declined to give further information.  For the sake of brevity, and as roughly indicating his origin, he was called “The Native.”  He might have been the original Old Man of the Mountains, who is said to be the only authorized head of the Teacup Creed.  Some people said that he was; but Dana Da used to smile and deny any connection with the cult; explaining that he was an “independent experimenter.”