In the whole of this strange movement nothing is more mysterious than the hold which Mr. Gandhi has over Mahomedans as well as Hindus, though the wrongs of Turkey, which are ever in his mouth, touch only very remotely the great mass of Indian Mahomedans, whilst the old antagonism of the two communities is still simmering and bubbling and apt to boil over on the slightest provocation. Collisions are most frequent during religious festivals, especially if they happen to be held by both communities at the same time. The chief stone of offence for Hindus is the sacrifice of cows, the most sacred to them of all animals, without which the Mahomedans consider their great annual festival of _Bakar-Id_ cannot be complete. Mahomedans, on the other hand, to whom musical instruments as an accompaniment to religious worship are abhorrent, are often driven wild when Hindu processions pass with their bands playing in front of a mosque. Only four years ago, when the compact between the National Congress and the Moslem League was still quite fresh, riots broke out simultaneously during the _Bakar-Id_ over a great part of the Patna district, which were only suppressed after a large tract of some forty miles square had passed into the hands of the Hindu mobs, when a considerable military force reached the scenes of turmoil and disorder, for the like of which, according to the Government Resolution, it was necessary to go back over a period of sixty years to the days of the great Mutiny. It would be of little purpose to enumerate many other instances of disorders on a lesser scale that have occurred since then in connection with cow-killing. When staying for a few days last winter in Nellore, a small town in the Madras Presidency, _i.e._ in a part of India noted for its quietude, I had a pertinent illustration of the often trivial but none the less dangerous forms that the persistent animosity between Hindus and Mahomedans can assume. In Nellore, itself a very sleepy hollow, the Mahomedans are not quite in such a hopelessly small minority as they generally are in Southern India, for they number about 6000 out of 30,000 inhabitants. The few "Non-co-operationists" in the place, Hindu and Mahomedan, professed to have formed a "Reconciliation Committee" to prevent their co-religionists from flying at each other's throats. Their efforts were not, however, sufficient to relieve the local authorities from the necessity of putting some of the police on special service for the protection of respectable Hindu traders of the same caste as Mr. Gandhi himself in their daily comings and goings through certain quarters of the city against the more unruly of their Mahomedan fellow-citizens. The usual bad feeling had been exacerbated by an affray, already the best part of a year old, when one of the Hindu processions from the four great temples of the city perversely altered its accustomed route and passed down the streets