ured polished floor, overhead
a domed roof with chrystal chandeliers, and smaller crystal lights round
the sides.

On the road home we met motors, dog-carts, and men and ladies going to
the dance; the motor dust here is twenty times thicker than at home; for
half-a-mile after you pass a motor you see nothing--can't open your eyes
in fact--then came a series of Rembrandts, in wayside lamplit stalls,
and home to mosquitoes and late dinner.

31st December, Sunday.--Spent forenoon writing letters and working up
sketches, and to make all smooth went to two churches and two temples in
the afternoon; a fairly good ending to the year. The first temple, a
pile of architecture of debased wedding-cake style, thick with
innumerable elastic-legged, goggled-eyed, beastly, indecent Hindoo
divinities. Thence to a Roman Catholic church in St Thome, the old
Portuguese quarter--very pretty and simple in appearance. The half near
the altar full of veiled European nuns in white and buff dresses. Nearer
the door, where we sat, were native women and children, mostly in red, a
few of them with antique European black bonnets and clothes; and in
their withered old faces you could imagine a strain of the early
Portuguese settlers. The altar was, as usual, in colours to suit the
simple mind; the Madonna in blue and white and gold with a sweet
expression of youth and maternity, her cheeks were like china, and she
dandled the sweetest little red-haired baby in a nest of gold rays, all
against a rocky background. How telling the fair Viking type of baby
must be to these little black-eyed, wondering worshippers, far more
fascinating and wonderful, I am sure, than their miraculous six-armed
gods. There were real roses too, such numbers of them, and altogether a
good deal of somewhat gim-crack effect, but the whole appealed to me,
for at least the idea of material beauty was recognised, and for a
minute I forgot all the ugliness (= Evil) that our churches have caused,
and the good (= Beauty) they have destroyed, and bowed and crossed
myself like my neighbours. Then we drove to another church near the sea,
St Thomes. The bones of St Thomas of the New Testament are said to be
buried here. We only looked into it; it was finely built, and inside at
the moment was almost as empty as a Protestant church on a week-day.
There was but one devotee, a black woman, confessing to a half-black
man. We shuddered and escaped, and drove a few yards and saw "The seas
t