The old hermit, Nikaiyah, who, in the early twilight, pursued his devotions on the banks of the river, was making his orisons to the Ganges when the reddening water and glowing east gave tokens of the dawn. As he stooped to perform his ablutions, an object, dark upon the water, caught his eye. It was the lotus-cradle and its burden. The old man’s heart was moved, and, despite the voice of religion, which forbade to rob the Ganges, he listened to the voice of nature, and with many deprecations of the divine wrath, he took up the child and carried it to his humble dwelling. There was no name for the child, and, partly as a peace-offering to the wronged divinity, he called it Ganga! He brought up the infant until its sixteenth year, though troubled by many misgivings as to the propriety of the responsibility of which he had relieved the Ganges. Here, then, the child’s youth was passed in the wilderness. And she grew to be as fair as the hues of her cradle, with eyes glittering like the lotus-leaves when sparkling with the foam-fretting waves of the Ganges, as the first sunbeams strike upon the buds, and the grateful heat unfolds the flowers to the pleasant air of the morning, and the glory of floral existence. Swift passed the days of her childhood; and as gayly as the gaudy butterflies that flitted all day round her dwelling, she passed from day to day, and from object to object, in the bloom of youthful happiness. Bright as the glow-worm, when wooing his mate, was the time of her childish experience. To follow the gayly-painted parrots through the odorous groves of spices, and watch the busy dragon-flies as they chase each other among the blossoms; to bathe in the limpid stream which had kindly borne her thither, and recline on its ever-green banks, watching the flow of the waters; these were her daily occupations, and these she pursued alone, for the old man was absorbed in devotion, and always rapt in pious contemplation. But anxious for her future welfare, he would sometimes, after they had finished their simple meal of vegetables, take her by the hand and unfold the ancient _veddahs_, or sacred records, and tell her of the Metempsychosis; tell her of the holy Trine, that threefold-unity—the Creator, the Preserver, the Destroyer; the all comprehended in Bramah, the parts in Seeva and Vishnu. How by inferior eyes it is interpreted, the earth, the generator; water, the fructifier; fire, the annihilator. How was born the Ganges, the adored one, by the beneficence of Bramah, described its primal course, and how at last, ——“To India’s favored land It rolled o’er fields of nard and spicy meads, And won its heaven-directed way.”