istian countries.
Occasionally, women of vicious lives in cities, having leisure, became
quite learned, and this made learning a shame for women of irreproachable
reputation. Moreover, Hindoo husbands declared, and believed, that if you
taught a woman to read she would be sure in time to have illicit relations
with some one. Ignorance was innocence, the safeguard of both rank and
chastity.

The missionaries, who were the first to attempt the amelioration of the
people, had to commence with the lowest castes or classes, those having
nothing to lose; and even then the teachers had to pay the girls a small
copper coin daily for attending school. Even the government schools in some
places pay the girls for attending, but they are much more popular than the
missionary schools, because, according to the Rev. Joseph Warren in the
report mentioned, the parents are not afraid that their girls will become
Christians by attending them; and he adds that the government teachers and
books are "all positively heathen or quite destitute of all religion." In
some parts of the country the government schools secure the attendance of
high-caste girls by allowing them to be placed behind a curtain, and thus
screened from the eyes of the male teacher or inspector, as all the women
of such classes are screened from male visitors. Even the physician sees
only a hand protruded from under a curtain, and by the touch of this, with
a few unsatisfactory answers to his questions, he is supposed to be able to
know what the malady is, and how to prescribe for it.

M.H.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Birds and Poets: with other Papers. By John Burroughs. New York: Hurd &
Houghton.

A duodecimo that discourses on equal terms of Emerson and the chickadee,
and unites Carlyle and the author's cow with a cement or filling-in
indescribable in variety and in the comminution of materials, need not be
held to strict account in the matter of neatness or accuracy of title. The
closing article, headed "The Flight of the Eagle," is the most remarkable
of the collection. Who would suspect, under such a heading, an elaborate
eulogy of Walt Whitman? The writer is obviously more at home among the
song-birds than among the Raptores, unless he be the discoverer of some new
species of eagle characterized by traits very unlike those of other members
of the genus. It were to be wished that he had left out the disquisition on
Whitman, for it is a jarring chord in his