Charaka shook his head, and Kevaddha continued: "May be you mean Krishna, the avatar

of love, he who danced with all the shepherdesses at once, finding an appropriate incarnation in their favorite swains, while each girl imagined that she alone held the god in her arms?"

"My question refers to no one of the gods," replied the novice, "but to God," and the emphasis with which he marked the difference showed that he felt not like joking on a problem which was of grave importance to him.

"Ah, I see!" exclaimed Kevaddha. His lip curled with sarcasm and there was a twinkle of triumph in his eye, for the topic under discussion reminded him of a. contest which he had had with a Brahman priest in which his antagonist had been completely worsted by his superior skill in pointing out the weak side of the proposition and holding it up to ridicule. "Ah, I see!" he exclaimed, "you do not mean any one of the several gods, but god in general. You are like the man who sent his servant to market to buy fruit and when the latter returned with bananas, mangoes, grapes, and an assortment of other fruit, he upbraided him, saying: 'I do not want bananas, nor mangoes,

nor grapes, nor pears, nor prunes, nor apples, nor pomegranates, I want fruit! Fruit I want--fruit pure and undefiled, not a particular fruit, but fruit in general!'"

Said Charaka: "Are you a wrangler, famous in the art of dialectics and you know not the difference between God and the gods? I love God but I hate the gods!"

"Is it possible," cried Kevaddha with a sarcastic chuckle, "you hate the gods and you love God? Can you hate all the single men, monks and laymen, traders, warriors, kings, noblemen, Brahmans, Kshatryas, and Shudras, and love man in general? How is it that you can hate the gods and love God? Does not the general include the particular?"

"Be so good, reverend sir," answered the novice, who began to chafe under the attacks of the brisk monk, "to understand what I mean. The world in which we live is a world of order, and we know that there are laws to which we must submit. When I speak of God I mean him who made us, the Omnipotent Creator of the Universe, the Father of all Beings,

the Standard of all Perfection, the Eternal Law of Life."