But the most interesting sight, by far, in this quiet old Indian town, is the community of white Jews who live on its southern side. No one knows when they came here. They probably arrived at the Dispersion of the first century of our era; or it may be later. But the community must have been reenforced from time to time, as they have maintained, in a marvellous way, the fairness of their complexion. It will not require much imagination, as one enters their synagogue, to think of the synagogue of Nazareth of old. As we ascend the stair-way into the little schoolroom above, and hear the little ones reciting, in pure Hebrew, passages from the Pentateuch, we can easily imagine that we are listening to the voice of a dear little Boy, nineteen centuries ago, reciting to His master those same passages in that same tongue in Palestine. There is hardly a place on earth where Judaism has met with fewer vicissitudes and changes than on this western coast of India. It is only a couple of hundred yards farther away that we find the synagogue of the black Jews--the descendants of those who were given by the ancient king to be slaves to the white Jews. They adopted the religion of their masters, and are still praying, like their masters, for the coming of the Messiah, of whose arrival and triumphs in India they seem to be oblivious. Leaving Cochin, we pass along the coast as far as Bombay, which has been called the "Eye of India," and also the "Gateway of India," two names which are equally appropriate to this beautiful city. There is hardly another city on earth where more races and religions blend. And its streets are made exceedingly picturesque by the many costumes of its polyglot population. Before the arrival of the plague, some eight years ago, Bombay was perhaps the most populous city in India. But this fell scourge has decimated its population and has robbed it of much of its ambition. Perhaps the most interesting people that we see here are the Parsees, with their "Towers of Silence." According to their belief, earth is too sacred to be contaminated, and fire too divine to be polluted, by the bodies of their dead, which, therefore, they expose in the towers, erected upon an adjacent hill, to be consumed by a crowd of hungry, expectant vultures. One usually sees forty or fifty of these filthy birds standing around the edge of each tower, watching the funeral cortege as it slowly winds its way up the hill, eager to pounce upon the body as soon as exposed by the bearers in the centre within. And from the time of exposure it takes hardly ten minutes before every particle of flesh has been consumed. The one hundred thousand Parsees of Bombay are almost the only representatives of the ancient faith of Zoroaster, perhaps the purest of all ethnic religions. They were driven out of their home land of Persia in the early onrush of Mohammedan fury, and fled, twelve centuries ago, to India, where they found asylum.