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Srikanta darkness! It was a tune I had heard times without number, but I did not know, coming from a bamboo pipe, it could be so sweet, so entrancing. Towards the south-east of the house was a large garden full of mango and jack trees. Nobody bestowed any care on it, and it had grown into a rank jungle through which the hoofs of cattle had marked out a thin path. It was along that path that the music was approaching.

My aunt sat up and addressing her eldest son, said, 'Nabin, is that the Rays' boy, Indra?'

Yes, all of them knew the player of the nocturnal music, and my cousin answered, 'Who but that scapegrace could play such music or would enter that jungle?'

'Then it is he. Is he really coming through the Gossains' garden?'

Nabin replied that he was. Perhaps my aunt felt a tremor of fear as she thought of the thick jungle in that impenetrable darkness. With fear in her voice, she asked, 'But doesn't his mother forbid him? Any number of people have been bitten by snakes in the Gossains' garden. What takes him there, I wonder, so late at night?'

'Well,' said my cousin with a laugh, 'that is the short cut between his part of the village and this: that's all. Do you think, mother, that he who has no fear and no care for his life will come by the roundabout way? All he wants is to come quickly; it matters little whether on the way he has to cross rivers or meet snakes or face tigers!'

'What a dare-devil boy!' said my aunt, and with a sigh lapsed into silence. The sound of the flute grew