A Mine of Faults

"A Mine of Faults" by F. W. Bain is a fantasy story translated from the old Hindu literature. Though the title of our story, A Mine of Faults, might lead the reader to expect, not without alarm, something geological and mineral, and hard, and stony, it really plays lightly with a somewhat softer substance, which only disconsolate lovers in the depth of their dejection ever venture to compare with rocks or flints—a woman. For here, as usual, the Sanskrit epithet conveys two meanings in one word: being, in one sense, a poetic synonym of the Moon: the maker of eve, the lender of beauty to the dusk: while, according to the other, it means a mine, or inexhaustible store, of blemishes, defects, or faults. And thus, as applied to a particular digit of the moon, that is, a lovely woman, it keeps the mind ambiguously hovering between her lustrous lunar beauty, and her faiblesse.