The others
were removed out of the way by Krishna, as soon as he saw the real
ones coming back.'
'But,' said I to the good old man, who told me this with a grave
face, 'must they not have suffered in passing from the life given to
death; and why create them merely to destroy them again?'
'Was he not God the Creator himself?' said the old man; 'does he not
send one generation into the world after another to fulfil their
destiny, and then to return to the earth from which they came, just
as he spreads over the land the grass and corn? All is gathered in
its season, or withers as that passes away and dies.' The old
gentleman might have quoted Wordsworth:
We die, my friend,
Nor we alone, but that which each man loved
And prized in his peculiar nook of earth
Dies with him, or is changed; and very soon,
Even of the good is no memorial left.[9]
I was one day out shooting with my friend, the Raja of Maihar,[10]
under the Vindhya range, which rises five or six hundred feet, almost
perpendicularly. He was an excellent shot with an English double-
barrel, and had with him six men just as good.
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