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110 FROM THE FIVE RIVERS.

mud hovel hitched on to the tomb until Suttu, coming in one evening with her veil full of dates, had found the old man quite unconscious on the saint's high wooden bed, which still stood over the grave under the dome.

The news thrilled the adjoining township with brief enthusiasm. Then a bustling Hindu assistant surgeon got wind of the case, and sanctity vanished before science. From that day, several years past, matters had gone from bad to worse. A railway appeared, reducing offerings to the lowest ebb; for, as Shâhbâsh declared with mingled truth and tears, the pilgrims counted their third-class return tickets as offerings to the shrine, and the traffic department charged dead against charity in the extortionate fares for sheep, goats, and fowls. On the other hand, the railway had certainly brought cholera three years in succession-an unheard-of event― and that had increased the chances of finding the gold in the digging of graves-graves, however, for which the perquisites lessened month by month. That was the village accountant's spite, born of family matters which went back to the time when Suttu was born. Inâm Ali had lived for six months in hopes that this posthumous child of his only son would be an heir to the saintship. In his first disgust he was only too glad to get rid of mother and child, by the former's marriage to the accountant