Yet with this long ancestry of dreamers, and her own intellectual capacity, and her poetic craving to find beauty, which even Nature did not satisfy (because what is Nature without Nature's God?), she obviously finds Hinduism completely barren of what she was yearning for, and apparently not having searched for it anywhere else except in Nature, she never comes at it at all. She appears to have been struck by something in the faces of the monks that she saw in Italy, and she "at one moment longs to attain to their peace by renunciation." But as the secret of their peace was not known to her, it only makes her long for Nirvana, or final nothingness. Her portrait at the beginning of the book represents a touching type of face which one meets with not unfrequently in India. The expression is dull and lifeless. There is none of the light which shines out of the face of a Christian Indian. But there is at the same time an expression of wistful longing for that hidden treasure which Hinduism could not give her, even when purged of its defilements. The result of which is, that her poetic mind has had to waste itself upon such themes as nightfall at Hyderabad, or the alabaster box in which she treasures her spices, or the bride weeping because her lord is dead. It is no exaggeration to say that a really happy-looking Hindu is a rare sight, even when on pleasure bent. Childhood in the Hindu world has its flashes of fun, but except in the passing excitement of some romping game, the faces of the children are usually as dull as those of their elders. Two Hindu boys were looking at the picture in the story-book of "Jerome, the Brahmin boy," in which the photographs taken on his first arrival is reproduced, showing his Hindu pigtail, and the paint marks on his forehead, and his sacred thread. Contrasted with this is the photograph taken soon after his baptism. I do not suppose that the boys understood the full significance of the pictures, and this made the comment of one of them the more valuable. "There is a great difference," he said, "between these two pictures. In the first the boy has a very bad face. But in the other picture it is very good." An English boy, writing in a letter on the subject of the same picture, says of Jerome as a Christian, "He looks twice as happy as when he was a heathen." CHAPTER XVII HINDUS AND RELIGION Irreverence in Hindu temples. Robbing the god. Burial of gods. Justice in native states. Giving the title of "god" to people. The god's relations. Hindu conception of god; of prayer. Nominal Hindus. The old army pensioner. The "thread" ceremony.