“What do Indian women do with their time?” how often I have been asked the question. Custom and religion make the day’s programme--a woman’s husband, and a woman’s God, are occupation in themselves, and then there may be the children. The good Hindu will have her house of Gods, her private Chapel. Sometimes there is an image in it. I have known God-houses without any image. The name of the particular God it is right for her to worship will be whispered in her ear by the family Priest, and not even to her husband may she reveal the secret. But in her Chapel you will find most often in Bengal, an image either of the Baby God a-crawling, or of Kali, the Mother. In Krishna Chapels there will be a little crib, fashioned in these Western-Eastern days like an English bedstead, with mosquito nets: and just as in the morning the devotee bathes and anoints the baby, leaving food beside it on the little altar, so at even-tide she lights the nursery lamp and puts it to bed.... Is this Hinduism? I do not know. In practice it seems to me but the Mother-worship of the Child. But in truth there is no one form or stage of Hinduism to be found in India, or, for the matter of that, in Bengal.... The great truths are eternal and prevail in every religion: yet all men are not capable of receiving the truth, and Hinduism recognizes this. In the actual worship of the idol are the illiterate and ignorant encouraged. “It would be sin to disclose to these the mysteries of a God not made with hands,” so says the wisest of my wise women ... “for he who has heard and hearkens not, and understands not, hath the greater sin.” Yet that even a child may be capable of instruction she proves to you. I have seen many hundreds of babies under her roof, babies ranging from three to twelve years of age doing their morning _pooja_. It is “the worship of the possible” that she teaches them, “the worship of the Might-be.” At 9 o’clock they come hastening to the hour of prayer, like the birds and lizards of the Moslem legend: each little devotee, lips pursed in serious earnestness, is carrying her “basket of worship,” and sits cross-legged to unpack it--an incense-burner, the bowl for Ganges water, flowers, bits of half-eaten fruit and vegetables, the sacrificial powder, often a remnant of some favourite saree, the Ganges mud with which to make her “idol”--all this she unpacks gravely, daintily, moulding her lump of clay into a cone.... Now she will make comparison with her neighbour, a little wistfully, perhaps, perhaps exultingly: often she shares her gifts.... Anything may be given to the God; the teaching here is to give what costs something, and when the _pooja_ is over, the Pujari carries round a food-collecting plate for the animals within the gates, and the crows on the housetops. Now she is threading garlands of the sacred white jasmine, and the Priests have come for the chaunting.