trees, which, always and everywhere, lend grace land beauty to the landscape they adorn.

I arrived at Gaya, after dark. It was quite an early hour; but the town, with its population of 76,000 souls, was already beginning to retire to rest. The atmosphere was oppressive, and the dimly-lighted streets, which were being turned into dormitories for the night, presented anything but agreeable pictures. Here and there a perspiring half-clad halwai, who had not yielded to the early closing movement, squatted listlessly in his " fly-swarmed sweetmeat shop " behind a few trays of uninviting confectionery; or a drowsy baniya, with his knees drawn up to his chin, dozed over his uncovered heaps of rice, dal, ata, and ghi. These half-awake shopmen were apparently the principal, if not the only, representatives of trade in Gaya at that hour. Charpoys in scores were already occupying the main thoroughfare in very unpicturesque disorder. On some of these rickety beds, unprovided with mattresses or pillows, the owners were stretched full-length; on others, two or three almost naked men sat silently fanning themselves in a drowsy way with little palm-leaf fans, or with the free ends of their dhotis. What was the burden of their thoughts, as they sat there on those charpoys in the hot and dusty street of the sacred city? Were they thinking, as so many of their national sages had thought before them, that, after all, life was not worth living? or were they performing that act of cogitation on the merits and defects of the British Government which the late Sir Richard Temple, sometime Governor of Bombay, seemed to think the two hundred and fifty millions of the Indian people perform every day?[1] Not being able to divine their thoughts, I can only say that my own mind was occupied with a sort
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[1] footnote It is difficult to summarize concisely what two hundred and fifty millions of people are presumably saying to themselves every day. But probably the sum of their thoughts amounts to this, that they are by the will of an inscrutable fate living under foreign rule; that they are ineffably better, nicer, pleasanter people than their rulers; that they have a purity of descent, a grandeur of tradition, an antiquity of system, with which a European nation has nothing to compare; that, despite their union, socially and morally, they cannot hold together politically, etc. "-'' Fortnightly Review," January 1883.