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THE GIFT OF THE MAHATMA.

WHILST looking through the papers of a lately deceased relative who had made me his executor, I came across the following story, which he expressly authorised me to publish if I deemed it of sufficient interest. On that point I have not the slightest hesitation. It is in itself so very remarkable that I feel it can need neither preface nor apology on my part, and leave it, with all condence, to speak, as it speaks so eloquently, for itself.

When I was at Oxford, one of my chief friends was Ralph Dunstan, a quaint creature whom all that were at the same College, and some few besides, cannot fail to remember. He was not a game-playing man, nor even a distinguished scholar; his name therefore was not at all generally known in the University. But for those who did know him he was always a remarkable man, in some ways rather a sinister man. He had a very dark complexion, and a nasty un-British habit of smoking out of a queer Oriental pipe. We liked neither of these things about him; and yet we ought to have made every allowance, for his father, who had been an Englishman in the Indian Civil Service, had committed the unforgivable sin of marrying a Hindoo lady, away up in some distant province where caste distinctions-that is to say, English ones--grow confused. So Ralph Dunstan, in spite of his name, was half Oriental.

There is only one place where class distinctions of the most childish kind are observed more strictly than in India, and that is an English public school or university. Dunstan had a true Oriental's sensitiveness, and I think it was the fact that I did not. offend this sensitiveness by sharing all the prejudices of most of our fellow undergraduates about him that made me his friend. I never did him any important service, that I am aware of, but he always treated me as if I was his benefactor and he in my debt thousand deep.

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While he was at Oxford his father died, and he went to India without taking his degree, so I doubt whether his name will be on the College books, though of course the buttery lists, and so on, of our day would show it.

VOL. X.-NO. 58, N.S.

20

For five-and-twenty years, a quarter of a century, I never saw him, never had a line from him, never thought of him, I may say, until a certain evening, the day before the Oxford and Cambridge match-great occasion for the reunion in Lord's pavilion of old pals, and for the resuscitation of high hats of various fossilised strata. I was smoking in my rooms, making a mild pretence of reading, and as reading, towards midnight, lapsed to reverie, my thoughts, for the first time for years, as it seemed to me, dwelt on Ralph Dunstan and the weird, and at whiles mystical, talks that we used to enjoy in the old College rooms. So much so was this the case that next day at Lord's, when an old undergraduate friend said, 'Whom do you think I saw in town to-day?' I replied without a moment's hesitation, Perhaps it was Dunstan.' 'Oh,' said the other; you knew he was in town? And then only did I perceive the singular coincidence that he should have been so much in my thoughts at the time of his coming. For that he had but just come I learned from my friend. Dunstan had that morning landed in London from the s.s. Orinoco.

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Very curious,' I commented to myself (I did not say anything about the coincidence to my friend, who would very properly have laughed). I hope he will come and see me.'

I was quite confident that he would; and had a kind of conviction that he would come late at night, at the hour of our old talks together. So after a very cheery dinner with some old 'Varsity friends, I went home and sat in what I knew to be a foolish state of expectancy-expecting Dunstan. I really did feel rather curious to see whether my conviction that he would come would be realised, although I felt a fool for expecting it, and further had a doubt whether Dunstan would have retained enough of English ways to think of looking for my address, on the hypothesis that he might wish to find it, in the Red Book.

I came in about ten-thirty, and at eleven-thirty was beginning to call myself names for my folly, when I heard a quick, light step come along the practically deserted street and pause, hesitatingly, before the door. I put my head out of the open window and said, Dunstan !'

I could not see the man plainly, but I was convinced it was he, and the next moment his gentle voice answered, just as when he used to knock at my oak at Oxford:

'May I come in? Am I too late?'

The lift-man went to bed at eleven, so I let my visitor in myself, and we went up the stairs together.

He had said no more than ' How d'you do?' in the old unemotional way, as if we had parted the previous day instead of twenty-five years before. Involuntarily I felt a little chilled by this greeting for the moment; but presently, as he sat down and began to talk very much in the old manner, without the least embarrassment by reason of the quarter-century gap in our intercourse, I fell to perceive that it was in fact the highest tribute that could be paid to the value of our friendship that he should accept it thus as the same, and at the same temperature, as we had known it all those years ago. There was none of that exchange of commonplaces which, at a meeting of old friends long separated, is so often necessary before one can arrive at the old warmth-like running off the cold water which has stood in the hot-water pipe, before the hot will come. Dunstan's manner was a triumph in the art of re-establishing the old relations at

once.

The man himself was hardly at all changed. His very dark hair had scarcely a streak of white. His face, always rather old and thin, looked no older and no thinner. Time had not been so kind to me. I had more figure than in undergraduate days, and less hair. Dunstan did not seem to notice it as we spoke of the old times.

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'I do not find you changed,' he said. In fact, I knew you would not be. It was yourself, your nature, that made you able to be my friend then, as you will always be.'

'But one does change all the same,' I said. 'Those deep metaphysical problems that we used to discuss—one gives them up, learns the futility of discussing them, as one grows older. Have not you found it so?'

'Had I been an Englishman I should have found it so, no doubt,' he said. You all do. The material forces-things that you can touch and see—are everything to you; it is not altogether so with us, with my mother's people.'

'You have pursued those studies-if they were to be called studies-then?'

'Those studies-well,' with his smile, 'not precisely those perhaps; but such studies as they formed a kind of groundwork for, no doubt. I have spent twenty of the last five-and-twenty years in Lhasa.'

'Lhasa,' I said with great excitement, Lhasa! Do you mean it, man? Why, do you know you are the first, the only white man-or the only one for many generations (you are a white man, you know) who has been to Lhasa? It is the goal all travellers have aimed at that has always baulked them. Lhasa! Why, man, you will be the lion of the season-of the world!'

'Yes,' he said again, with an appreciative smile. 'I shall lecture before the British Association and at St. James's Hall-like De Rougemont. Thank you, my friend.'

'Go on,' I said. What will you do, then?'

'I shall do, of this kind of thing, that gets fame and notoriety, just nothing. I have been allowed to come over here on business quite different from that, business that I may not tell, even to you. But one thing I may do; before I started I received leave to do you, my friend, my only English friend, a good turn.'

'Really,' I said, not a little embarrassed. 'I am very much obliged to you, but what can you do for me? There is nothing that I want particularly, so far as I know. And in any case I am not aware that you are indebted in any way to me.'

'You are not aware-no, that is just it.

If you were aware in all probability it would not be the same at all. But without being aware you gave me, when we were friends together at Oxford, the one thing that is most precious to us-to us who are of my mother's people. Ah, you English do not understand it,' he went on, warming up to an unusual enthusiasm in his subject. You do not understand what it is to us to have some sympathy given us the help that it is to us. You Europeans do not know what it means. And, besides, you do not want it so much in

this climate.'

I laughed aloud. You speak of it just as if it were whisky,' I said, 'that you can drink more of in the Highlands than you can in southern England.'

He did not resent my comparison or my laughter in the least. It had always been one of his attractions that he never did resent laughter.

'You are quite right,' he answered gently. It is like whisky. It has the same effect on what you would call (it is the nearest expression to designate your non-comprehension of these things) sensitive nerves. It strengthens, helps, braces them, to use your words. Only, with sympathy there is no reaction.'

'And what words would you use?' I asked.

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'I would use words that would have no sense to you,' he said, for they would be in a language that you do not know; but perhaps if for "sensitive nerves you were to read "soul" it would bring what we mean nearer to your understanding.'

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'So you mean to tell me that whisky is good for the soul— very excellent conclusion. But I thought you Orientals were so careful in your use of alcohol?'

'That is the reason,' he said with a smile, for he was by no means without a sense of humour. 'We know that it acts directly on the soul, on the nerves (oh, how will you say it in your stupid modern language?). You believe that it "ruins the soul," as your temperance preachers say; but they mean only after it has ruined the body. You do not understand, I suppose, how the universal soul is present in every particle, atom, or whatever you are pleased to call it, of matter?'

'No,' I said, 'I do not think I do understand.'

'You look, you Englishmen, on matter as a solid thing, inert —something that you can pinch; and then, by and by, a bit of matter gets affected in some singular way, and you say "it is alive; it has a soul"; but cannot you understand that the soul inheres in each atom of matter, and that it is only the bringing together of certain atoms in a certain way that means a soul and life? It is not that the atoms differ.'

'I dare say you are quite right,' I said; 'I don't see how you prove it.'

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'Oh!' he said in despair, that is so English, so hopeless. Unless you bring a thing through all the Courts of Appeal right up to your House of Lords you will not believe it; and yet your British Association of all the savants swallowed De Rougemont like an oyster, whole.'

'Never mind De Rougemont,' I said, rather annoyed at his persistent gibe at the great British Association, which I had been taught to revere.

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'Do you remember,' he went on, that wonderful discovery that we thought we had made one night in the old rooms at Oxford, when it dawned on us that if we were in a certain star whose rays took nineteen hundred years to reach us (and there are many that take many more), and had only sufficient power of vision, we should see the events happening on the earth, not that are taking place to-day, but the great event that took place close on nineteen hundred years ago—the shepherds being led by the

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