mstances and are perfectly contented. The middleman,
who is usually a Persian Jew, makes the big profit.

Winter is not a good time for visiting northern India. The weather
is too cold and stormy. The roads are frequently obstructed by
snow, and the hotels are not built to keep people up to American
temperature. We could not go to Cashmere at all, although it is
one of the most interesting provinces of the empire, because
the roads were blocked and blizzards were lurking about. There
is almost universal misapprehension about the weather in India.
It is certainly a winter country; it is almost impossible for
unacclimated people to live in most of the provinces between
March and November, and no one can visit some of them without
discomfort from the heat at any season of the year. At the same
time Cashmere and the Punjab province are comfortable no later
than October and no earlier than May, for, although the sun is
bright and warm, the nights are intensely cold, and the extremes
are trying to strangers who are not accustomed to them. You will
often hear people who have traveled all over the world say that
they never suffered so much from the cold as in India, and it
is safe to believe them. The same degree of cold seems colder
there than elsewhere, because the mercury falls so rapidly after
the sun goes down. However, India is so vast, and the climate
and the elevations are so varied, that you can spend the entire
year there without discomfort if you migrate with the birds and
follow the barometer. There are plenty of places to see and to
stay in the summer as well as in the winter.

We arrived in Bombay on the 12th of December, which was at least
a month too late. It would have been better for us to have come
the middle of October and gone immediately north into the Punjab
province and Cashmere, where we would have been comfortable. But
during the entire winter we were not uncomfortably warm anywhere,
and even in Bombay, which is considered one of the hottest places
in the world, and during the rainy season is almost intolerable,
we slept under blankets every night and carried sun umbrellas in
the daytime. At Jeypore, Agra, Delhi and other places the nights
were as cold as they ever are at Washington, double blankets were
necessary on our beds, and ordinary overcoats when we went out
of doors after dark. Sometimes it was colder inside the house
than outside, and in several of the hotels we had to put on our
overcoat