Page:Malabari, Behramji M. - Gujarat and the Gujaratis (1882).djvu/170

154 He was then a flourishing young man of seventeen, and I was his junior by some years. Though I belonged to quite another race, Adamji took kindly to me from the very beginning. We met under peculiar circumstances. We were both suffering from a bereavement, and our sympathy was therefore very warm for each other. Adamji often invited me to dinners. When these dinners were private affairs they were extremely frugal. A handful of parched rice was thrown into the sands in which we were sitting, and one by one the individual grains were picked up by us during intervals of discourse. Adamji was, as a rule, my moral preceptor, and his morality was of almost a divine nature when we had to make shift with the parched grain aforesaid. He then talked of Heaven, and said the surest way to go thither was by conciliating the friendship of the Mohla, but it would be pleasanter to begin with marriage than death. One day Adamji brought home his bride from Kapadwanj—his "brand-new wife," as Adamji told me in the pride of his heart. He gave us (me and other friends) a grand dinner on the occasion. A young buffalo