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 girl looks up gravely into his face. There let us leave the mystery, which readers can solve for themselves when the book of these stories is added to the writer's other English books. But the figure of the young girl, as she first appears at the water-side, or as she sits afterwards with the leveret in her arms looking up and wondering, lives still as the veritable spirit of the place where she is seen. Rasik is only the agent of her unapproachable maidenhood; the indicator of the mystery.

In the story of another child of nature, "Sweet Tongue"—so called before she is discovered to be dumb—we have for setting another water-side village. The village is Chandipur, and the stream is for Bengal a small one; "rather like a slender girl in a household of sturdy country folk." Nature seemed to wish to lend the silent girl a voice, the lapping of the water, the trilling of birds, the rustling of leaves, join themselves to the voices of the crowd and the boatmen's songs, and all mingle together with the constant movements and agitation of Nature, and break, as it seems, like the surf on the sea-beach, in her ever-silent breast. In such tales Rabindranath confesses, as he does in his songs,