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104
THE TRUST PROPERTY
ing people: "Do you hear any wailing sound?" They laughed at the raving dotard.
About four years later, Jaganath lay on his death-bed. When the light of this world was gradually fading away from his eyes, and his breathing became more and more difficult, he suddenly sat up in a state of delirium. Throwing both his hands in the air he seemed to grope about for something, muttering: "Nitai, who has removed my ladder?"
Unable to find the ladder to climb out of his terrible dungeon, where there was no light to see and no air to breathe, he fell on his bed once more, and disappeared into that region where no one has ever been found out in the world's eternal game of hide-and-seek.[1]
- ↑ The incidents described in this story, now happily a thing of the past, were by no means rare in Bengal at one time. Our author, however, slightly departs from the current accounts. Such criminally superstitious practices were resorted to by miserly persons under the idea that they themselves would re-acquire the treasure in a future state of existence. "When you see me in a future birth passing this way, you must make over all this treasure to me. Guard it till then and stir not,"—was the usual promise extracted from the victim before he became yak. Many were the "true" stories we heard in childhood of people becoming suddenly rich by coming across ghostly custodians of wealth belonging to them in a past birth.
