erly beside the mark and valueless, so long as
the goddess of cholera, Jarimari, and the thirty-eight Cholera Mothers are
wroth with them. Thus at the time we speak of, when many deaths among their
kith and kin had afforded full proof that the goddess was enraged, they met
in solemn conclave and decided to perform every Sunday and Tuesday night
for a month such a ceremony as would delight the heart of that powerful
deity and stave off further mortality. The limitation of the period
of propitiation to one month was based not so much upon religious
grounds as upon the fact that a Municipality, with purely Western
ideas of sanitation and of combating epidemics, refused to allow
the maintenance of the shed, which was to be the temporary home of
Jarimari, for more than thirty days. Yet it matters but little, this
time-limit: for a month is quite long enough for the complete assuagement
of the anger of one who, though proverbially capricious, is by no means
unkindly.

* * * * *

Let us glance at the ceremony as performed on a Tuesday night towards the
middle of the month of propitiation. In the darkest portion of the
_wadi_ stands a rude hut, containing the emblems of the Mother,
occupied for the time being by Rama Bhandari, who acts as a species of
medium between the goddess and his kinsmen. In front of the hut a space has
been cleared and levelled, flanked on one side by mats for the Bhandari
musicians, singers, drummers and cymbal-players, and on the other by four
or five chairs and a few wooden benches for the initiates in the mysteries;
and to the stems of several neighbouring trees lamps have been affixed
about five feet from the ground, which cast weird shadows across the
threshold of the goddess's home. Rama, the high-priest of this woodland
rite--a dark, thin man with a look of anxiety upon his face--enters the hut
with his assistant, Govind, while several fresh looking Bhandari boys take
up their position near the gong, cymbals, and drum, prepared when the hour
comes to hammer them with might and main. A pause--and Rama returns bearing
the symbol or idol of the Mother, followed by Govind carrying a lighted
saucer-lamp. The idol, for such we must perforce style it, is nothing more
nor less than a bright brass pot, full of water, set on a wooden stool
which is thickly covered with flowers. In the mouth of the water-pot rests
a husked cocoanut, with a hole in the upper end into which are