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Rh women gave friendly looks, the women draped gracefully in the single long sari, or winding-cloth, that, either red or white, is a foil to the dark skin and lends majesty and picturesqueness to the frowziest. Nearly every woman wore silver bracelets and anklets, armlets, finger-rings, ear-rings, nose-rings, and necklaces past counting, and one never knows what silver jewelry can effect, nor its artistic value, until he sees it against these sooty Tamil skins.

The village of Chidambram clusters low before the soaring gopura of this oldest Shivaite temple of the south, and its seventy rest-houses shelter thousands of pilgrims at every December mela. Four of these great pagoda-like structures, each 160 feet in height, carved, painted, and gilded over, with a massive trisul, or trident ornament of Shiva, for capstone, admit to the quadrangular space of thirty-two acres occupied by the labyrinth of shrines and courts and halls around the great tank. The temple was built a thousand years ago by a pious raja, who had seen Shiva and Parvati dancing on the near-by sea-shore; and the holy of holies is a golden shrine dedicated to the god of dancing. Another tradition says that a Kashmir prince of the fifth century brought three thousand Brahmans with him from the north and founded the temple. The greatest popularity was given the temple when "the golden-colored emperor," a leper prince who had come south on a pilgrimage, was cured by bathing in the temple tank, and thousands emulate him every year.

Repairs were being executed in many places, at the instance of a pious Hindu of Madras, and we