ttles, and all appurtenances of the mighty pilgrimage. The bazaar
is crowded with monkeys, the feeding of which affords boundless
opportunities to pious Hindus for accumulating merit. These favours
the monkeys repay by surreptitiously snatching sweetmeats and fruits
from the open shop-fronts and darting off with the booty to the roofs
of the shops opposite, where they devour them in quiet with sly winks
and leers at the luckless shopkeeper. Though inwardly wrathful, he
cannot retaliate on the sacred animals, lest he be dubbed a heretic
and his trade depart. Here, too, we see everywhere exemplified the
irrepressible faculty of the Hindu for worshipping anything which
can possibly be made into an object of veneration.

Probably all the world through, no race is to be found so bent on
turning all the events and circumstances of life into religious
acts of worship. If anything or anyone is pre-eminently good or
pre-eminently bad, or has any particular quality, good or evil,
developed to excess, or is a monstrosity in any way, then he or it is
sure to become an object of worship. A Hindu addicted to wine-bibbing
will sometimes turn his drinking orgy into an act of religious worship,
in which the wine-bottle is set up on a pedestal and duly garlanded,
apostrophized, and adored. A Sadhu may be a notoriously bad man, but
if his vices have given him a preeminence over his fellow-men, he will
find multitudes of Hindus, men and women, who will regard them only
as so many proofs of his divinity, and worship him accordingly. It is
not that the Hindu does not recognize or reprobate vice--he does both;
but, then, he holds the idea that spirit is eternally pure and good,
and matter eternally gross and evil, and that if a Sadhu attains the
stage where spirit has triumphed over body, his actions become divorced
from ethics, and are no longer to be judged as though his spirit was
capable of contamination from the acts of its earthly tabernacle.

Hence it is that the stories of the Hindu divinities, which seem to
us distinctly immoral, do not strike the pantheistic Hindu mind as
such, for ethics have ceased to be a concern to one whose austerities
have won for him union with the Divine Essence. Here in Hardwar was a
weird collection of bovine monstrosities--cows with three horns, one
eye, or a hideous tumour; calves with two heads or two bodies. These
were paraded forth by their fortunate possessors, who reaped a good
harvest of coins fro