must do the same, over and again, whatsoevertimes they are banished from their hearth-stone. Because you are bad makes for no reason why I should not be good.
CHAPTER III.
In Solitude.
Not far off from the place where Nabokumar was cast away, now stand two straggling villages under the names of Daulatpur and Dariapur. But at that period of which we are speaking, there could scarcely be visible any signs of human habitation. It was all woodland. The part of this countryside was not so as other parts of Bengal which are usually flat. An unbroken range of sand-dunes traversed the whole stretch of ground lying between the mouth of the Rasulpur river and the Subarnarekha. If the series of the sand-elevations would have been a little bigger in height, these might have claimed the appellation of a chain of sandhills. Now people call these the Baliari. The white cliffs of the Baliari or sandhills appear unusually bright under the hot meridian sun. No tall trees grow on those heights. Shrubs and undergrowths abound at the feet of these sand-mounds though the arid desolate belt and summit generally emit a white glow. Of the
