the cost of travel to a minimum, and
accomplished the circuit of the globe for a less sum than the rent of a
furnished house in Mayfair for only a twelvemonth. It is true that she
submitted to privations which the English tourist would deem
insupportable; she embarked in sailing ships because they were cheaper
than steamers; resorted to third-class railway carriages; avoided
expensive hotels; lived always with the "masses" and on plainest fare;
and dispensed with the services of dragoman or interpreter. But for all
that her enjoyment was not the less, and she saw much which, had she
travelled in the usual fashion, she would not have seen.

One is apt to think that a woman who accomplished such really remarkable
feats of endurance and energy must have been endowed with great physical
strength and robust proportions. But such was by no means the case. Her
stature did not exceed--nay, was below--the average, and there was
nothing masculine in her face or figure. "I smile," she says in one of
her letters, "when I think of those who, knowing me only through my
voyages, imagine that I must be more like a man than a woman! Those who
expect to see me about six feet high, of bold demeanour, and with pistol
in my belt, will find me a woman as peaceable and as reserved as most of
those who have never set foot outside their native village."

At Benares she saw the bazaars, and the temples, and the palaces; the
bathing in the Ganges, the burning of the dead on the bank of the sacred
river, and a nautchni or dance of nautches; but her attention was
chiefly drawn to the miserable fanaticism of the fakeers, who revelled
in self-imposed tortures. Thus they stuck an iron hook through the
flesh, and allowed themselves to be suspended by it at a height of
twenty or twenty-five feet; or for long hours they stood upon one foot
in the burning sunshine, with their arms rigidly extended in the air; or
they held heavy weights in various positions, swinging round and round
for hours together, and tearing the flesh from their bodies with red-hot
pincers. One man held a heavy axe over his head as if about to fell a
tree, and in this position stood immovable like a statue; another held
the point of his toe to his nose. Yet, from one point of view, these men
are right. What torture of the body can equal the torture of the soul?
If it were possible by any amount of physical pain to still and silence
the agony of conscience, who would not endure it? Th