We rode round it in a sort of court-yard, enclosed by small two-storied houses, which were very filthy, and out of which emerged men, women, and children, very filthy also; we were soon encompassed by a crowd of the most disreputable, dissolute-looking wretches imaginable. The women were dressed in thick woollen gowns, which had once been red, and reached a little below the knee; these were loosely fastened round the waist, remaining open or closed above as the case might be. The children, notwithstanding the inclement temperature, were in the cool and airy costume common to the rising generation in the East. The men were dressed exactly like the women; their matted hair and beard, flat noses, and wide eyes, generally bloodshot, giving them a disgusting appearance. Both sexes wore a sort of woollen gaiter, open at the calf, the protruding muscle of which looked as if nothing could have confined it; their shoes, as far as the dust would allow me to see, were of the same material. They seemed good-natured and inoffensive, but are not free from the vice of drunkenness; they consume quantities of tea prepared with rancid lard. Had I been asked to determine the origin of this race, I should have pronounced it to be a mixture of Naples lazzaroni with the scum of an Irish regiment. The ruddy complexions of some of the women, and the swarthy look of many of the men, might fairly warrant such a conclusion. They were so importunate and offensive as they pressed round me that I hurried over my sketch of the temple, and made my escape from them, not, however, without once more looking round with interest on the crowd of beings whose distant habitations were upon the northern slope of the Himalayan chain, hitherto unvisited by any European, except Dr. Hooker, and consequently almost totally unknown. I quite envied them the journey they were about to undertake, which would occupy them three weeks; the large droves of sheep by which they are always accompanied carried their limited worldly possessions, together with the various tokens of civilization which they had procured in the (to them) highly civilized country they were now visiting, and on which no doubt their Bhootan friends would look with no little awe and wonderment. This wandering and singular race do not visit Nepaul solely to worship at the temple of Bhood, but have an eye to business as well as religion. I shall have occasion by and by to speak of the numerous articles which they import into Nepaul, on the backs of sheep, over the rocky passes which lead from the cold region they inhabit.