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162 boughs, and bore it off to the burning-ghat. The group of women remained behind, and standing in a circle facing inward, wailed and tossed their arms. Some were dry-eyed and watched us while they wailed and beat their breasts, but the mother was unmistakable in the group—her cries and gestures in pathetic contrast to those of the others.

When we had twice gone the length of the ghats, drifting down to the railroad bridge and rowing back to the upper ghats, reviewing seven miles of bathing, praying, misguided people, we landed where the crowds were thickest, the din loudest. The well filled with Vishnu's perspiration, and in which Devi dropped her ear-jewel, and the stone foot-print of Vishnu make this spot the center of busiest religious life on the river bank. There priests and people swarmed thickest, all bellowing the history of the pool in one's ears; and the sick and the well, the diseased and the robust, crowded the inclosing steps of this tank of filth, an abominable ooze of Ganges slime, decaying flowers, spices, sweetmeats, butter, and milk. They sipped and drank this liquid death, and we hastened from the noisy crowd of priests, pilgrims, fakirs, beggars, Brahmans, jugglers, snake-charmers, money-changers, and idlers with sacred cows wearing bead and flower necklaces, pushing their way when it was not obsequiously cleared for them.

Processions of people carrying water to their homes and the temples, and spilling it as they went, made walking dangerously slippery, and we barely looked into the court of the Golden Temple, where