with a sublime joy. He sat down on the sandy beach. The dark foamy endless waters! Far as the eye could reach on either side, long white lines of foam flashed on the crest of the waves as they broke on the flat line of the beach, and shone against the golden sand like a garland of snow-white flowers. But over the expanse of ocean, too, a thousand waves were dancing and breaking into foam. If the wind could reach the stars and set them in motion across the background of the sky, this alone could fitly image the sight of the white foam-spots on the dark waters of the sea. The sun was about to set, and where the line of soft light fell, the water was transformed to molten gold. And in the distance some European ships could be descried, skimming the ocean like gigantic birds with great white spreading wings.
‘How long Naba Kumár continued to gaze at the ocean, he could not tell. Suddenly the darkness of night came down on the bosom of the deep, and he then remembered that his way back must be found.
* * *‘Turning his back to the sea, he saw a magnificent vision. There stood on the sandy beach of the deep-sounding sea, dimly seen in the twilight, the figure of a woman such as he had never seen before. Her cloud-like tresses confined by no hand, flowed down below her knee in long serpentine curls. * * Her face was partly hidden, but it shone like the moon through a break in the clouds. There was a mild and subdued light in her large eyes. Her expression was grave: but her face beamed on him like the moon now newly risen over the surface of the deep.’
The young woman thus described in language rather more lofty than distinct, turns out to be a Kapál Kundala, a girl who had been saved from the wreck of one of those Portuguese pirate ships, which in old times ravaged the whole coast of Bengal in search of slaves, and who had been brought up by the Kapalika hermit in his solitary dwelling for ultimate purposes of which she new nothing. She had imbibed from him a deep veneration for his goddess Káli, but her soul revolted from the human sacrifices which the Kápálika offered to Kali whenever occasion offered. The two returned to the hermit’s cell, and it soon appeared that Naba Kumár was intended for sacrifice. His host, who was a man of vast strength, had tied him to the stake and would have at once carried out his purpose, but Kapál Kundala concealed the sacrificial knife, and when the Kápálika went to look for it, she cut the prisoner’s bonds and the two took at once to flight. After a time they reached a solitary shrine, and induced the pújari to marry them, Nobo Kumár, it is needless to say, being deeply enamoured of his companion, and she having no objection to marriage because she had no idea what it meant. The pujari showed them, too, the way to Midnapore, from whence Naba Kumár’s residence at Saptagrám was easily reached.
This was not Naba Kumár’s first marriage. He had been married once before, but while his wife was a mere child; and she having
