tions.

Benares, Allahabad, Cawnpore, Lucknow--J.W. came to these cities with a
queer feeling of having been there before. Long ago, in his early Sunday
school days, the names of these places and the wonders of them had been
the theme of almost the only missionary book he had at that age cared to
read.

At Allahabad, said his companions of the way, an All-India Epworth
League convention was to be held, and J.W. made up his mind that a
League convention in India would be doubly worth attending. He did
attend it too, but it left no such memory as another gathering in the
same city; a memory which he knows will last after every other picture
of the East has faded from his recollection.

The party had reached Allahabad at the time of the Khumb Mela, a vast
outpouring of massed humanity too great for any but the merest guesses
at its numbers. This "Mela," feast, religious pilgrimage, whatever it
might mean to these endless multitudes, is held here at stated times
because the two sacred rivers, the Jumna and the Ganges, come together
at Allahabad, and tradition has it that a third river flows beneath the
surface to meet the others. So the place is trebly sacred, its waters
potent for purification, no matter how great one's sin.

With the others J.W. set out for an advantageous observation point, on
the wall of the fort which stands on the tongue of land between the two
streams. On the way J.W. assured himself that if Calcutta seemed without
religion, here was more than enough of it to redress the balances. In
the throng was a holy man whose upraised arm had been held aloft until
it had atrophied, and would never more swing by his side. And yonder
another holy one sat in the sand, with a circle of little fires burning
close about him. The seeker after he knew not what who made his search
while lying on a bed of spikes was here. And once a procession passed,
two hundred men, all holy after the fashion of Hindu holiness, all
utterly naked, with camels and elephants moving in their train. As if to
show how these were counted men of special sanctity, the people fell on
their faces to the ground beside them as they passed, and kissed their
shadows on the sand.

The point of vantage reached, J.W.'s bewildered eyes could scarce make
his brain believe what they saw. He was standing on a broad wall, thirty
feet above the water, and perhaps a hundred feet back from it. Up and
down the stream was an endless solid mass of heads. J.W.