The Imperial Museum at Calcutta is well worth a couple of hours, for it
contains one of the finest collections of antiquities in the Orient. The
museum is housed in an enormous building facing the Maidan, which has a
frontage of three hundred feet and a depth of two hundred and seventy
feet. In the ethnological gallery are arranged figures of all the native
races of India with their costumes; agricultural implements, fishing and
hunting appliances, models of Indian village life, specimens of ancient
and modern weapons and many other exhibits. Another room that will repay
study is a gallery containing old steel and wood engravings of the great
characters in the mutiny, with busts of Clive, Havelock, Outram and
Nicholson, and with a life-size bust of Thackeray.

BATHING AND BURNING THE DEAD AT BENARES

It is estimated that one million pilgrims visit the sacred city of
Benares every year, and it is these pilgrims that furnish the largest
income which the city receives from any source. Here are the most holy
shrines of Buddhism; here Vishnu and Siva have their strongholds, and
here must come Hindoos from all parts of India to bathe in the sacred
waters of the Ganges and to offer up prayers at the many holy shrines in
the city's temples.

Benares is sacred because here Buddha first made his residence. The
place that he selected was ancient Sarnath, six miles from Benares,
which is now a heap of ruins, in which British government experts are
delving for remains of the great city that was founded six centuries
before the Christian era. At Sarnath Buddha built a great temple and
founded a school from which his disciples spread to all parts of India.
But after 750 A.D. Buddhism disappeared gradually from India, and
Hindooism took its place. The fine temples that now line the Ganges for
three miles were built by Maratha princes in the seventeenth century.
They also built the scores of bathing ghats that now furnish one of the
most picturesque spectacles that the world affords. A ghat in Hindustani
is a stone stairway that leads down to the water, and Benares has a
succession of these magnificent stairways leading down to the Ganges,
overlooked by palaces of many Maharajas and temples built by rulers and
priests. No sight more splendid could be conceived than that of these
domes and minarets flashing in the rays of the early morning sun while
thousands of devout believers crowd the bathing ghats and offer prayers
to Vishnu,