of the Tower for the next comer. Their experienced gaze
perceives a funeral procession a mile away in the direction of the city,
and a signal cry is so readily understood by vultures resting on trees
in the neighborhood that a unanimous attendance is assured long before
the corpse passes the portal of the grounds.

The human skeletons are left within the Tower to disintegrate by action
of sun and wind, heat and cold. In time the bearded men, gloved and with
tongs, remove them to a vast well in the middle of the enclosure, where
with lapse of time they turn to dust.

Corpses being considered unclean by Parsee standards, carriers of the
dead, as well as those who enter the Towers, are assigned to a class by
themselves, and forbidden to mix with others of their strange religion.
There is a superstition that an awful curse would be visited upon an
unauthorized person whose gaze fell upon a body or skeleton inside a
Tower of Silence. The habiliments of those whose duty takes them within
are always destroyed before they leave the grounds.

Whatever may be claimed in defense of the Parsee method of dealing with
their dead, from a sanitary standpoint, the custom possesses an aspect
gruesome in the extreme. The Hindus' system of burning on the river bank
is even less repulsive.

If any city in the East is sport-mad it is Bombay. Men work there
mornings and engage in something of a sportive character afternoons. The
school-boy, even, slings his books from a hockey stick, and the
departmental clerk sets out for an afternoon's sociability accompanied
by his faithful tennis racquet. Nowhere can better polo be seen than on
the Marine Lines Maidan; as for cricket, there probably are more players
in Bombay, British and native, than in any town of its population in
England--and Bombay's cricket is of the best. More than once have crack
teams out from England been heartlessly beaten by local Parsee players.
Golf is considered too slow. The next best thing to being a member of
the nobility is for a Briton to belong to the Royal Bombay Yacht Club,
for it gives him the _cachet_ to everything Asiatic. The club-house on
the Apollo Bunder possesses the best situation on the water front, and
from its verandas fashionables watch matches that are sailed with
consummate skill. During winter months foot-ball appeals strongly to the
soldier class, while motor-car races and trials appear to be daily
events.

[Illustration: A BOMBAY RAILWAY STATI