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might to sentence me.' The Swami, never heeding the interruption, continued with a calm and even voice: 'I sentence you to the living death of the outcast until such time as you expiate your crime, acknowledge your errors, and regain your caste status, which you forfeit to-day, through the regular methods as laid down in the holy books. Your friends and relatives will assemble on the first unlucky day of next week, and will offer, as if to your manes, a libation in a pot of water which a slave girl shall dash against the walls of your house, and all who take part in this ceremony shall be regarded as impure for three days. Your friends and relatives shall not be permitted to accept your hospitality, nor shall you be allowed to share theirs. Your touch shall be pollution unspeakable. Your children shall be outcasts and shall not marry anybody but Mangs and Mahars. Your own father and mother shall be forbidden your house under the risk of losing caste. Neither your barber, your tailor, your cook, nor your washerwoman shall work for you. Nobody shall assist you in any way, not even at the funeral of a member of your household. You shall be debarred access to the temples—'

"Here Rao, who had mocked and laughed during all this sentence, cried: 'Save your breath, oh holy one, for indeed all this tommyrot can never affect me. As to hospitality, I don't care to invite those old fossils of Brahmins into my house, nor could I ever bring myself to set foot in theirs and listen to their tiresome dissertations about the Veda and the Upanishads; besides, I've plenty of European friends. As to my children being outcasts, know, revered uncle, that I have none, and that if ever I should have any they will be Americans like myself and marry like myself. As