Different civilizations, different notions of cleanliness. The point seems to be to learn each other’s aversions and respect them. The Hindu is horrified at the use of tooth-brushes. “What! use the same brush twice?” She herself uses a twig of the _Neem_ tree, no fatter than her own smallest finger, and of course there is a fresh twig for each using. Again, at the use of tubs, “You go dirty into the water from which you expect to come out clean,” she exclaims. You refer gently to the bathing in the Ganges. “Ah, but that is different,” she will answer, “that is holy water, however apparently impure, however apparently contaminated, it is holy.” Her reasoning explains what hitherto puzzled me--how little particular the Hindu is about the intrinsic cleanliness of water, despite her belief in sacred streams. The Founders of the religion, knowing the value of water in a hot country, called it sacred, no doubt in order to keep it clean. Their thought was, “It is sacred, do not defile it.” The modern Hindu says, “It is sacred--even the thing that most defiles, cannot defile it.” The same Hindu who will bathe before touching the sacred basil, will be absolutely indifferent as to the water in which she bathes. If it is a sacred river, a sacred tank, it may be thick as pea soup with impurities. That is no matter.... Again, another incongruity. The eating of the flesh of the cow revolts a Hindu--you do not realize how strongly till it is something other than yourself--as a dog, suspected of a meat diet, who sniffs at them; and yet the sacrifice of goats at Kalighat, for instance, cannot be seen unmoved by the most inveterate eater of flesh. The fact is, that with the Hindu the root of all aversion is traditional religion, and this it is which overlays the ordinary aversions of instinct or culture. At the present day purely arbitrary, too, seems the table of clean and unclean, though, as in all religions, no doubt it had its one-time significance. In an agricultural country the cow was a useful animal. If you wished preservation, the only way was to declare it sacred. The religious sanction appeals most strongly to peoples in their infancy, and in India we find a nation which still keeps its nursery rules, so to speak.... And, as is proper, the women know far more about these rules than do the men. A Hindu will often say, appealed to on this point or that of religious custom or religion: “I do not know, but information may be had in _the Inside_.” One such Inside produced the fact that the sanctity peculiar to the Ganges applies to one town at least, to Puri by the Sea. As the Ganges receives all castes--in death, so does Puri--in life.