there were sacrifices every few
minutes, and on the great day of Kali-worship, in October, the place
runs ankle-deep in blood.

In the old days--and not so long ago at that--there were human
sacrifices at Kalighat, and when I asked the priest concerning them,
his significant answer was that the British Government would no longer
allow them. He made no claim that Hinduism itself has changed! Their
Kaliki Purana says that one human sacrifice delights Kali for a
thousand years, and in spite of British alertness a bloody human head
bedecked with flowers was found in a Kali temple near Calcutta not
many years ago, and at Akrha, also near Calcutta, human sacrifice has
been attempted within a decade.

From the Kalighat temple the priest of Mother Kali took me {201} to
the edge of the dirty, murky Hoogli (sacred as a part of the Ganges
system), where in its consecrated filth scores of miserable pilgrims
were washing away their sins or "acquiring merit" with the gods. On
the way we passed the image of Juggernaut, the miserable stable-like
shelters in which the pilgrims are lodged, and the image of Setola,
"the Mother of the Smallpox," as the priest called her, to which
smallpox victims come for cure. Back again to the temple, the priest
assured me that if I would give the other priests a few annas (an anna
is worth 2 cents of our money) they would drive back the shrieking,
bloodstained, garlanded crowds of half-naked "worshippers" and give me
a view of the Kali idol. The money forthcoming--and the high priest,
in expectation of a tip, coming out to lend his assistance--there
ensued such a Kilkenny fight between the priests and the dense mob of
"worshippers," such knocking, kicking, scrouging, as never any man got
for the same amount of money in any prize-fight, until finally I got a
swift glimpse of the idol's hideous head.

Then having paid the greedy priest and the high priest (like the
daughters of the horseleech they always cry for "more") I went back to
my hotel, properly edified, let us believe, by this spectacle of Hindu
"religion."

It was Sunday morning.

Could I have been otherwise than impressed when I went that afternoon
to another Indian religious service--this time of Christians--and
compared it with what I had seen in the morning? Instead of a
money-hunting priest sitting beside a butcher's block and exacting a
prescribed fee from each pushing, jabbering, suppliant of a
bloodthirsty goddess, herself only o