cocoanuts, sugar, and betel,
the celebration closes. A few girls still dance and jerk their shining
bodies before the altar, but Rama who is getting weary touches them with
his hands, commanding the frenzy to cease, and with a sigh they withdraw
one by one into the dark shadows of the palm-grove.

* * * * *

Such is in brief the ceremony of propitiation of the Cholera-Goddess. What
does it signify? It appears that according to Bhandari belief the disease
is the outcome of neglect of the Mother. The present conditions of life in
the cramped and fetid chawls of the city, the long hours of work
necessitated by higher rentals and a higher standard of living, leave her
devotees but little leisure for her worship. She is maddened by neglect and
in revenge she slays her ten or fifteen in a night. Yet is she not by
nature cruel. Fashion for her a pleasant shrine, flower-decked, burn
incense before her, beat the drum in her honour, let the women offer
themselves as the sport and play-thing of her madness and of a surety will
she repent her of the evil she hath done and will stay the slaughter. In
spirit-parlance a woman chosen by the spirit, into whom as into a shrine
the mother enters, is known as a "Jhad" or tree: for just as a tree yields
rustling and quivering to the lightest breath of the gale, bends its head
and moves its branches to and fro, so the women, losing all consciousness
of self, play as the breath of the Mother stirs them, quivering beneath her
gentler gusts, bending their bodies and tossing their arms beneath the
stronger blasts, and casting themselves low with bowed heads and streaming
hair as the full force of the storm enwraps them. They are in very truth as
trees shaken by the wind. Nay more, the Mother herself once lived in human
form: she knows the pleasure, the comforts of the body and she is fain, by
entering the bodies of her female devotees, to renew the memories and
suggestions of her former life.

* * * * *

In conclusion one may briefly record what the Bhandaris thought of the
presence of a European at their sacred rite. Some feared him as one that
contemplated the imposition of a new tax; others viewed him askance as a
doctor from the Hospital despatched by higher authority to put an end to
the ceremony; and yet others,--the larger number insooth,--deemed that here
at last was a Saheb who had found physic a failure and had learned tha