wonderfully painted, who by attitude and grouping
represented the families of certain great gods. There was a holy man who
sat naked by the day and by the week on a cluster of iron spikes, and did
not seem to mind it; and another holy man, who stood all day holding his
withered arms motionless aloft, and was said to have been doing it for
years. All of these performers have a cloth on the ground beside them
for the reception of contributions, and even the poorest of the people
give a trifle and hope that the sacrifice will be blessed to him. At
last came a procession of naked holy people marching by and chanting, and
I wrenched myself away.

CHAPTER L.

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that
wears a fig-leaf.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

The journey to Benares was all in daylight, and occupied but a few hours.
It was admirably dusty. The dust settled upon you in a thick ashy layer
and turned you into a fakeer, with nothing lacking to the role but the
cow manure and the sense of holiness. There was a change of cars about
mid-afternoon at Moghul-serai--if that was the name--and a wait of two
hours there for the Benares train. We could have found a carriage and
driven to the sacred city, but we should have lost the wait. In other
countries a long wait at a station is a dull thing and tedious, but one
has no right to have that feeling in India. You have the monster crowd
of bejeweled natives, the stir, the bustle, the confusion, the shifting
splendors of the costumes--dear me, the delight of it, the charm of it
are beyond speech. The two-hour wait was over too soon. Among other
satisfying things to look at was a minor native prince from the backwoods
somewhere, with his guard of honor, a ragged but wonderfully gaudy gang
of fifty dark barbarians armed with rusty flint-lock muskets. The
general show came so near to exhausting variety that one would have said
that no addition to it could be conspicuous, but when this Falstaff and
his motleys marched through it one saw that that seeming impossibility
had happened.

We got away by and by, and soon reached the outer edge of Benares; then
there was another wait; but, as usual, with something to look at. This
was a cluster of little canvas-boxes--palanquins. A canvas-box is not much
of a sight--when empty; but when there is a lady in it, it is an object
of interest. These boxes were gr