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Far away from home he begged, in the conventional manner, for alms and food, and retiring with the broken scraps that had been cast into his begging pot, he seated himself in a retired place, and, facing the east, ate without loathing (for his purpose and passion were strong) his first mendicant meal, so different from the repasts to which he had been accustomed.

He resorted for instruction, as was natural, to the Brahman priests, and hearkened to the exposition of their doctrines, but found little satisfaction therein; for to him, in his ardent state, they probably seemed cold and abstract.

As there are traditional records of Buddhas antecedent to Sakya, fragments of whose speech is incorporated with orthodox Buddhist scriptures, we may suppose it possible that the works of these earlier prophets were accessible to the new seeker after wisdom, and that what he may have studied meant more to him than it did to those of the learned class of the Brahmans who were without his enthusiasm.

As he pursued his pilgrimage he acquired from certain Brahmans instruction in the faculty of silent abstraction and contemplation of the Supreme Being, but could not obtain from them the peace and certainty he sought that deep interior tranquillity which, as it is said, was at that time already called Nirvana.

Finding that by contemplation he arrived no nearer at the bodhi or Buddhahood of which he was in search, he devoted himself to the vanquishment of Nature or concrete matter. Although not regarding as an end the austerities that subdue the force of the sense life, he spent six years in study and the practice of the utmost extremes of starvation and penance. At length,

after dieting himself on a scanty allowance of seeds, and so reducing his body to a skeleton, he concluded that physical prostration, or any but a rational treatment of the body, was attended with debility of the will and no elevation of the mind; and, as the path of perfection evidently did not lie that way, he rejected the system of mortification of the flesh.

The years of privation had no doubt brought this fruit, that they had tested his earnestness and enabled him to vanquish any tendency to luxury or selfishness that his nurture in a palace might have implanted in him.

But being satisfied that Buddhahood was not to be reached through depravation of the body, but through enlightenment of the mind, he resumed his ordinary pilgrimages as a friar, and his simple but sufficient fare. On proper diet and a less unnatural mode of life he regained both his bodily strength and mental vigour, but was deserted by the disciples who had been attracted by the amazing extreme of austerity which he had reached.

He now passed some time alone in his hermitage, or under divers trees, thinking out the problems which had disturbed him, and absorbed in deep meditation. Temptations assailed him, but his principles enabled him to withstand them, even the cowardly terrors of the Demon of Death.

Somehow his philosophy came to him, with the solid conviction for which he had longed. He was enabled to penetrate into the first principles of things, as it seemed, and so to lay the foundation of a practicable plan of life.

"Having attained this inward certainty of vision, he decided to teach the world his truth. He knew well what it would bring him,-what opposition, in

sult, neglect, and scorn. But he thought of three classes of men: those who were already on the way to the truth, and did not need him; those who were already fixed in error, and whom he could not help; and the poor doubters, uncertain of their way. It was to help these last that the Buddha went forth to preach."

In himself he felt freed from the limitations of corporeal existence, but for the sake of promoting the emancipation of others, he did not pass away into his higher state, but directed his steps to the Deer Park at Sarnath, where he unfolded his principles, and first to those to whom he had been an offence by his departure from his course of consummate austerity. As they had followed him for his transcendent mortification of the flesh, so it is to be presumed that they were now attracted by the supremacy of his wisdom. In three months' kindly instruction he succeeded in converting them.

After this he preached in many places, in forests and groves, in palaces, by rivers, in gardens, in cities. He visited Benares, and finally settled in the Jetavana at Sravasti, where a monastery was built for him. His followers rapidly increased; he taught, by conversation only and precept, to the end of his life, which reached the span of eighty years.

Disciples had clustered round in great numbers in these latter years, and wherever the preacher went there followed him a crowd. A general proclamation of the powerlessness of the world of sense to satisfy the soul, a simple code of deeply-founded morality, a continuous appeal to the law of kindness to all living things, an entire disregard of caste and contempt for social distinctions as trivialities in the face of the great danger of continuance in wearisome

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was a renovation of a truth proclaimed long before. "The man who has learned to recognise all beings in the supreme spirit and the supreme spirit in all beings, henceforth look upon creature with contempt:' (IsaUpanishad).

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It matters little whether the new teacher obtained hints of his philosophy from Brahman or Jain. His true legacy was the infusion of a new earnestness into religion, so that one of the epithets that has become attached to him, or to any true follower of his, is, "He that hath life."

His doctrines all led in one direction-conduct. Knowing how much happier we are ourselves in our earnest and unselfish moments than when we are drifting down the heavy stream of ennui, or seeking for a new pleasure with an over-pleasured, enfeebled, and yet feverish taste, we need not wonder at the influence gained by a man who had power to really rouse his hearers out of apathy and formality into vitality, or even into a wholesome fear, and could succeed in stimulating them out of indulgence into conviction that in the abandonment of selfish pursuits lay the certain way of peace; while, on the other hand, the poorest person by becoming a stoic may win an individual consciousness of power. Buddha did not expect anxieties to be laid down

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IN THIS WORLD:

A NOVEL.

By MABEL COLLINS, Author of "An Innocent Sinner," &c. Continued from page 153.

CHAPTER XXXII.

ANGELS' VISITS. ERNESTINE'S unceremonious departure from the quaint confessional scene in which Coventry played the part of father confessor, meant that she was afraid of letting her feelings run away with her, and that she intended to distract her mind by work as quickly as possible.

It was a curious feature in her character, and known to scarcely anyone but herself, that this apparently cold woman was frequently driven to take such means to conquer the intensity of feeling which burned behind the calm exterior, and threatened to break it down.

She went straight from the Silburn's house to Miss Armine's lodgings. She found that lady sitting dolefully enough in the new rooms which Dorothy had found for her. The blinds were down, and the little parlour looked dim and gloomy.

"Will you room?" said Miss Armine, rising languidly from the corner of the sofa in which she had been curled up; "my head aches so, I cannot bear the light."

excuse this dark

Ernestine found her way in the semi-darkness to the side of the

sofa.

"And I am all over chills, and I ache from head to foot; and I can't

eat anything, and I was doing a little picture on commission, and it isn't finished."

To this pathetic outcry Ernestine made an irrelevant answer.

"Come to the window; you must bear the light for a moment, as I want to see your tongue."

in

Miss Armine submitted silence. Ernestine only held the blind back a little.

"Coated with creamy fur-no wonder you can't eat. You must go to bed right off and leave pictures and commissions alone for the present."

In a quarter of an hour Miss Armine was in bed, to her own intense relief, in the character of a really sick person. She had held up her aching head and worried about her pictures just as long as was possible; and now, when the effort was becoming unbearable, the doctor had come and told her to lie down and give up the responsibilities of life. The release was as nearly pleasant as any sensation could be to her in her present state; and she laid her head upon the pillow in her darkened bedroom with a sigh of thankfulness.

"Don't spend too much of your time here, dear Dr. Ernestine," she said. "It is not worth your while."

"You must be well nursed," said Ernestine gently, as she gave

some finishing touches to her arrangements.

Miss Armine raised her head in horror, and started up on to her elbows in spite of her weariness.

"Nursed-oh no, indeed, I shall want no nursing, I can't pay a nurse; and indeed, dear Dr. Ernestine, I will be so good and take so much care of myself, I shall not want a nurse."

"Very well," said Ernestine, quietly, "you shall not have one if you don't wish it.”

The promise pacified the girl, for she had little idea of how ill she really was, or what skilled nursing she would require.

Ernestine had little time to think of her own affairs after this.

She had Miss Armine's life in her hands, as she well knew, and she was determined to save it.

"Ernestine," said Dorothy, one day when she found her by Miss Armine's bedside; "it is not right for you to spend half your time here. You are not attending to your own interests."

I

"Typhoid," was Ernestine's somewhat oracular reply, "depends more than any known disease on good nursing. I think I am attending to my own interests in properly looking after a case like this. dare not trust any but a very good nurse with her now; but I find it will be necessary for some one to stay with her while I am obliged to be away, as I sometimes am.'

"I will do that," said Dorothy; "I shall just enjoy it. I was born to be a nurse; I only want a little training, and this will just be an opportunity for me."

And so these two women (neither of whom, by the way, could rightly afford to do it) gave their time and their brains and their hearts to Miss Armine; watching her night and day, and nursing her through the fever and delirium.

Ernestine was indeed glad, so

far as was possible, to lose thought of her own life and troubles in Miss Armine's. Her struggles were harder, her future was more doubtful, than she let even Dorothy know. She was heavily handicapped at the beginning of her solitary career. She was a woman, to begin with a fact which, in England, places a worker at a great disad vantage. She was compelled by sheer lack of money to take obscure lodgings, instead of a house, in Wimpole-street; and her paying connection was so small that she began to feel her daily bread and butter a matter of great concern. Indeed she knew that, unless some fresh opening came for her before long, she would be in actual want.

One day she heard that a housesurgeon was wanted at the hospital where she had so long worked. She debated much whether to apply for the post, which would avert her immediate distress, as she would have rooms in the hospital and a small salary. It required some courage to go back among her old colleagues and brave all the gossip which her applying for such a post would cause. She put the idea aside for a day or two, and gave unremitting attention to her few patients. But they were so few, and her connection showed so little sign of increasing, that she could not let the opportunity slip altogether. So one day she left Dorothy to take charge of Miss Armine, whose course of fever had not yet run out, and walked to the hospital.

She was welcomed with great courtesy by her old friends. Dr. Vavasour Doldy was something more than Dr. Vavasour had been. She had entered the aristocracy of medicine, and was respected accordingly; and her proposal was evidently looked on with favour, though with some surprise, until she made it known that she would expect to

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