unhealthy enough, but the great festival falls at the beginning of the rains, when the water tumbles in solid sheets. Then lanes and alleys are converted into torrents or stinking canals, and the pilgrims are driven into vile tenements. Cholera invariably breaks out. Living and dead are huddled together. [Illustration: Distant View of Zempoala Aqueduct, Queretaro, Mexico] In the numerous so-called corpse fields around the town as many as forty or fifty corpses are seen at a time, and vultures sit and dogs lounge lazily about gorged with human flesh. In fact, there is no end to the recurrence of incidents of misery and humiliation, the horrors of which, says the Bishop of Calcutta, are unutterable, but which are eclipsed by those of the return journey. Plundered and fleeced by landlords, the surviving victims reel homeward staggering under their burden of putrid food wrapped up in dirty clothes, or packed in heavy baskets or earthenware jars. Every stream is flooded, and the travelers have often to sit for days in the rain on the banks of a river before a boat will venture to cross. At all these points the corpses lie thickly strewn around (an English traveler counted forty close to one ferry), which accounts for the prevalence of cholera on the banks of brooks, streams and rivers. Some poor creatures drop and die by the way; others crowd into the villages and halting places on the way, where those who gain admittance cram the lodging-places to overflowing, and thousands pass the night in the streets, and find no cover from the drenching storms. Groups are huddled under the trees; long lines are stretched among the carts and bullocks on the roadside, then half saturated with the mud on which they lie, hundreds sit on the wet grass, not daring to lie down, and rock themselves to a monotonous chant through the long hours of the dreary night. It is impossible to compute the slaughter of this one pilgrimage. Bishop Wilson estimates it at not less than 50,000, and this description might be used for all the great India pilgrimages, of which there are probably a dozen annually, to say nothing of the hundreds of smaller shrines scattered through the peninsula, each of which attracts its minor horde of credulous votaries. [Illustration: Near View of Zempoala Aqueduct, Mexico]