ers,
the Ganges and the Jumna. Three sacred rivers, I should have said, for
there is a subterranean one. Nobody has seen it, but that doesn't
signify. The fact that it is there is enough. These pilgrims had come
from all over India; some of them had been months on the way, plodding
patiently along in the heat and dust, worn, poor, hungry, but supported
and sustained by an unwavering faith and belief; they were supremely
happy and content, now; their full and sufficient reward was at hand;
they were going to be cleansed from every vestige of sin and corruption
by these holy waters which make utterly pure whatsoever thing they touch,
even the dead and rotten. It is wonderful, the power of a faith like
that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and
the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such
incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining.
It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is.
No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination
marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites. There are choice great
natures among us that could exhibit the equivalent of this prodigious
self-sacrifice, but the rest of us know that we should not be equal to
anything approaching it. Still, we all talk self-sacrifice, and this
makes me hope that we are large enough to honor it in the Hindoo.

Two millions of natives arrive at this fair every year. How many start,
and die on the road, from age and fatigue and disease and scanty
nourishment, and how many die on the return, from the same causes, no one
knows; but the tale is great, one may say enormous. Every twelfth year
is held to be a year of peculiar grace; a greatly augmented volume of
pilgrims results then. The twelfth year has held this distinction since
the remotest times, it is said. It is said also that there is to be but
one more twelfth year--for the Ganges. After that, that holiest of all
sacred rivers will cease to be holy, and will be abandoned by the pilgrim
for many centuries; how many, the wise men have not stated. At the end
of that interval it will become holy again. Meantime, the data will be
arranged by those people who have charge of all such matters, the great
chief Brahmins. It will be like shutting down a mint. At a first glance
it looks most unbrahminically uncommercial, but I am not disturbed, being
soothed and tranquilized by their r