r this opinion with the greatest diffidence, for
I know the author of "India" is an artist--still--"I know what I like,"
as the burglar said when he took the spoons.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

BENARES.--One evening we took train from Calcutta to Benares. Flat
fields of white poppies were on either side, and English park-like
scenes, without the mansions, and we thanked our stars we had not to
live in what the Norse call "Eng" or meadow land.

The things of interest in Benares are in order--first the Ghats, then a
river called the Ganges, and the monkey temple; of course there are a
great many natives, but from a cursory impression of the faces in the
crowds, I think they rank after the monkeys.

We arrived on a feast day with the golden beauty of Burmah and its
people fresh in our minds, and found these natives were painting the
town red. They slopped a liquid the colour of red ink over their
neighbours' more or less white clothes, and threw handfuls of vermilion
powder over each other--an abominable shade of vermilion--so roads and
people and sides of houses were all stained with these ugly colours; in
fact, at the Ghats or terraces at the river side, where many thousands
were congregated, the air was thick with the vermilion dust. From the
water's edge up the steps to the palaces and temples and houses at the
top, the terraces swarmed with thousands of people, and the talk and
mirthless laughter rose and fell like the continuous clamour from a
guillemot rookery.

The scenes we met in the streets were only to be described in language
of the Elizabethan period. If to-day at home we pass obscurantism for
morality, the Indian does the reverse; he tears the last shreds from our
ideas of what Phallic worship might once have been.

I think the Ghats are the most nauseating place in the world; there, is
Idolatry, in capital letters--the most terrible vision that a mind
diseased could picture in horrible nightmare! for you see thousands of
inferior specimens of men and women dabbling in the water's edge, _doing
all and every particular of the toilet in the same place almost touching
each other_, and right amongst them are dead people in pink or white
winding sheets being burned, and the ashes and half-burned limbs being
shoved into the water--and I forgot--there's a main sewer comes into the
middle of this.

We got on to a boat with a cabin on it, and sat on its roof on decrep