to the presence of the vultures, though
they were not at all unpicturesque, for their unwieldy copper-coloured
bodies contrasted well with the massive and brilliant foliage.

From the Towers of Silence we drove in a kind of quadruple dog-cart,
with four seats facing alternately outwards, forwards, and backwards,
and drawn by a fiery pair of horses, through the native town to the
yacht. The view from the road, cut, as it is, in the side of the
Malabar hill, was both beautiful and striking. It looks down upon a
perfect sea of palm-leaves, gently waving in the breeze, which
conceal, save where the tower of some tall building peeps forth, a
city of more than 800,000 inhabitants.

[Illustration: The Ghauts, Bombay]

Four o'clock of the morning of February 16th found me in the verandah
outside our bungalow, listening to the roaring of the cannon, which
ushered in the day on which was to be celebrated in India the Jubilee
of Victoria, its Queen and Empress. The hours are early here, and at a
quarter to eight Lady Reay, Captain Gordon, Tom, and I started to
'assist' at the grand ceremony at the Town Hall, followed later by the
Governor and his aides-de-camp. As we neared the city the crowd became
greater, everyone being dressed in holiday attire, and all apparently
in a great state of enthusiasm and excitement. It looked like a
many-tinted bed of flowers; for the Parsee ladies, unlike their
Mahomedan and Hindoo sisters, have no dislike to display their
toilettes in public, and are always clad in the gayest colours,
arranged with perfect taste. The only specially distinctive mark in
their costume is a rather unbecoming white band drawn tightly over the
brow. In many cases, however, this had been judiciously pushed back so
far as nearly to disappear under the bright-coloured silk sari which
only partly concealed their jet-black and glossy tresses. Every Parsee
has to wear the sacred shirt of cotton gauze, and the Kusti, or cord
of seventy-two woollen threads, representing, like the divisions of
the Towers of Silence, the numbers of the chapters of one of the
sacred books.

Near the Town Hall the scene became still more animated, and the
applause of the multitude, though much more subdued in tone than the
roar of an English crowd, was quite as enthusiastic. The men from
H.M.S. 'Bacchante' lined the approaches to the building, and the
Bombay Volunteers acted as a guard-of-honour. We were ushered into the
gallery, where chairs