2. "O my lords and my gods,[1] help me: and give me offspring. For behold, I am grown old. And I am come near unto the tomb. And what do men say? Lo, Khikâr is dying, and he hath no son to bury him, nor daughter to lament him; and I have no heir after my death who shall inherit my wealth, and cast dust with his hands upon me, that I may not be left unremembered amidst my kinsmen."
3. Then a voice came from the gods and said unto me: "O Khikâr, thou scribe, 'tis not ordained for thee to have offspring. But thou shalt only take Nathan, thy sister's son, and bring him up as thy son. And he shall fill up the place of thy name amidst thy kindred."
4. And when I heard this answer from the gods, I forthwith took Nathan, my sister's son, of one year old. And I clothed him in Byssus and purple, and I decked him out as a king's son. And I nourished him in all good things, till he was seven years of age. Then began I to teach him the literature of the sciences and the philosophy of wisdom. The answers unto letters and the replies made in disputations [I taught him], nor did I rest from teaching him day and night. And I surfeited him with teaching and with wisdom, as with bread and water. [&c.]
The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh. By W. Crooke, B.A. 4 vols. Calcutta, 1898.
If in every Indian province there were found an officer with knowledge and enthusiasm equal to those of Mr. Risley and Mr. Crooke, we should soon have a vast accumulation of information upon the natives of the great Oriental Empire under British rule. In these four volumes, comprising about 2,000 pages, Mr. Crooke has brought together the results of minute enquiries conducted by him for many years. Well may he say: "No one can undertake with a light heart such an enquiry as this connected with a population aggregating nearly forty-eight millions of souls; and, at the outset, had I been fully aware of the difficulty of the survey, I should have hesitated to undertake a work which has been carried out all through side by side with the multifarious duties of a District Officer." It must have been a toil of no ordinary kind; and it has laid the Government of India and every student of anthropology under a deep debt of gratitude to the scholar who
- ↑ Other MSS. add the names of the gods, viz.: "Belshim and Shimil and Shamin," probably old Assyrian deities. No other version, I believe, preserves these names here.
