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130 timent's sake one would almost rather have seen the temple crumbling and vine-grown in a rubbish- choked court, as it was in 1860. There was a chilling neatness and a forbidding order, too, about the crowded monuments, remains of monuments, and foundations of monuments in that flagged area thirty feet below us, which told of the archæologist with his tape-measure, his numbers and labels, the restorer with his healing plaster and illusive cement. The view came so suddenly, there was such silence, with no moving object anywhere in sight, that it was as unreal as if a vast drop-curtain had blocked the path. The silence, too, was befitting the sacred place, the actual scene of the great penance and struggle, the illumining of the Light of Asia, the birthplace of India's noblest religious system, a place hallowed by the traditions and associations of twenty-five centuries of religious life. No other visitors, not a pilgrim nor a worshiper, came to that court for hours. Our melancholy Moslem servant, the big, sheeted Brahman, who knew as little as the Moslem of this treasure-spot, and the languid, lesser Brahman, more brainless still, were the only moving creatures in all that sunny space. The shrieks of little parakeets, as they flew with flashes of emerald light in and out of the niches of the temple and the branches of the Sacred Bo-tree, were the only sounds in the mellow, slumbering air, that same perfect midday atmosphere that belongs to the ideal days of the East Indian winter, as to the sun-ripe days of the American Indian summer. All the world drowsed in that golden calm—it was the ideal Mahabodhi.