er affianced bridegroom the Son; and we
call her Mother because she blesses us all, and we are anxious to
accost her by the name which we consider to be at once the most
respectful and endearing.'

Any Englishman can easily conceive a poet in his highest 'calenture
of the brain' addressing the ocean as 'a steed that knows his rider',
and patting the crested billow as his flowing mane; but he must come
to India to understand how every individual of a whole community of
many millions can address a fine river as a living being, a sovereign
princess, who hears and understands all they say, and exercises a
kind of local superintendence over their affairs, without a single
temple in which her image is worshipped, or a single priest to profit
by the delusion. As in the case of the Ganges, it is the river itself
to whom they address themselves, and not to any deity residing in it,
or presiding over it: the stream itself is the deity which fills
their imaginations, and receives their homage.

Among the Romans and ancient Persians rivers were propitiated by
sacrifices. When Vitellius crossed the Euphrates with the Roman
legions to put Tiridates on the throne of Armenia, they propitiated
the river according to the rites of their country by the
_suovetaurilia_, the sacrifice of the hog, the ram, and the bull.
Tiridates did the same by the sacrifice of a horse. Tacitus does not
mention the river _god_, but the river _itself_, as propitiated (see
[_Annals_,] book vi, chap. 37).[3] Plato makes Socrates condemn Homer
for making Achilles behave disrespectfully towards the river Xanthus,
though acknowledged to be a divinity, in offering to fight him,[4]
and towards the river Sperchius, another acknowledged god, in
presenting to the dead body of Patroclus the locks of his hair which
he had promised to that river.[5]

The Son river, which rises near the source of the Nerbudda on the
tableland of Amarkantak, takes a westerly course for some miles, and
then turns off suddenly to the east, and is joined by the little
stream of the Johila before it descends the great cascade; and hence
the poets have created this fiction, which the mass of the population
receive as divine revelation. The statue of little Johila, the
barber's daughter, in stone, stands in the temple of the goddess
Nerbudda at Amarkantak, bound in chains.[6] It may here be remarked
that the first overtures in India must always be made through the
medium of the barber, whethe