remote village that has hardly been heard of, and he has for his solace been led to believe that the King himself is sending him a letter. Here, you may think, is a slender thread by which to move the pulleys. But as it was acted, even with the drawback of having a partly Irish, instead of an Indian, characterisation of its village humours, it proved moving and particularly effective in the stroke of tragedy redeemed at the close. The pathos would have been too much for a stage-idyll, except that imagination saved it, and that in the Indian order death is so often not catastrophe at all, but a blessed escape.
The story of the boy, Amal, is clear as folk-tale, up to the point where the King's letter and the chief motive grow, or seem to be growing, too significant for mere tale-telling, and need the dramatic emphasis. The boy sits at his window, from which every one who passes is seen like a messenger of the world's affairs and the day's events denied to him. The villagers—the Curd-seller, the Watchman, the little Flower-girl Sudha who reminds one ever so slightly of Browning's Pippa in Pippa Passes, the Gaffer, the Village Headman who is the village bully—
