date you dreadfully, threaten you with thrashings, and laugh till their sides ache because you are excusably afraid. Mother monkeys whisper the woes of the menage. And disgraceful old grandfathers swing furiously by their tails, or gather in gesticulating clumps, and tell each other smoking-room stories which one is too young to hear.
Here also is a Cow Temple—an archway out of the crowded street, a courtyard with a well in the center—marigolds have been thrown into that well every day for a thousand years—and the smell of rotting shell is as nothing to the smell of rotted marigolds. Crowded—crowded? Jammed, during the hours of worship, with cows. They go there unprompted. Singly, if very devout; in threes and fours, if more gossiply inclined. I cannot make out if the most of them go hoping to become better cows, or merely to see and criticize each other's new marigold wreaths.
In the streets of Benares the many-templed, the much-worshiped, the devout,
