vine servants, while in
the North they were pests and thieves, the enemy of the farmer.

Among other hospitalities enjoyed, was a dinner with an American, Mr.
C. L. Brown, who represented the Tudor Ice Company, of Boston, and who
sold solidified water from Wenham Lake. The piece that clinked in the
glass of Carleton, "sparkling and bright in its liquid light," had
been harvested in 1865, three years before. He described it as a
"piece of imprisoned cold, fragment of a bygone winter," which called
up "bright pictures of boys and girls with their rosy cheeks and
flashing skates,--a breeze of old associations." At Benares, various
root ideas of Hindoo holiness were illustrated, including the linga
worship and the passion for motherhood in that strange phallic cult
which, from India to Japan, has survived all later forms of religion.
In Calcutta, Old India had already been forgotten in the newer and
more Christian India. He visited especially the American Union Mission
Home, where Miss Louise Hook and Miss Britton were training the girls
of India to nobler ideals and possibilities of life. After seeing the
school, Carleton wrote: "Theirs is a great work. Educate the women of
India, and we withdraw two hundred millions from gross idolatry. This
mighty moral leverage obtained, the whole substratum of society will
be raised to a higher level. The mothers of America fought the late
war through to its glorious end. They sustained the army by their
labor, their sympathy, their heroic devotion. The mothers of India are
keeping the idols on their pedestals."

Personal accidents in India were minor and amusing, mostly. Crossing
the Bay of Bengal on the _Clan Alpine_, one of England's opium
steamers bound to China, a boiler blew up. The "priming" of the iron,
the life of the metal, having been burned out in passing from fresh to
salt water, was the cause of the trouble. Nineteen persons, eighteen
natives and a Scotsman, were killed or badly scalded. Carleton rushed
out from his stateroom, amid clouds of steam that made his path nearly
invisible, and was happy in finding his wife safe on deck at the
stern. At sunset the Christian was given the rites of burial. The dead
Hindoos, not being used to religious attentions paid to corpses, were
heaved into the sea, and the voyage continued. This was not the first
or the last time that Carleton experienced the sensation of being
blown up while on a steamboat.

CHAPTER XIX.

IN CHIN