The Hindoos have their own system of agriculture, and raise fruits, flowers, and grain, of various kinds. The chief productions of their husbandry are rice, flax, sugar, indigo, cotton, potatoes, peas, beans of different species, and fruits too numerous to name. India has no winter; her rivers do not freeze, her high trees stand clothed with leaves and decked with flowers all the year round; her birds are merry, her sky fair, her sun bright and warm, her rivers grand, her mountains high, her children numerous, intelligent, and philosophical, her religion superstitious, her gods many, and her age old. May she thrive and grow upward, high as her Hymaloy, giving her light to, and receiving that from others,--this is the heartfelt prayer of her absent son. APPENDIX. Ever since my arrival in America I have heard with great surprise the statement, received on the authority of missionaries, that the Hindoo mothers throw their infants into the river Ganges. Almost every man, woman, boy, or girl in these United States knows it, and has seen the illustration of it in various books. During my tour over some sixteen States and the Canadas, I noticed that the Hindoo mother, her baby, and the alligator, were the subjects of constant inquiry. The story of the infants being thrown into the Ganges by their heartless mistaken mothers, is believed by the people of this country to be either a custom or a religious institution of the Hindoos. I am aware that to speak against this prevalent belief is to falsify the reports of travellers and to criticise the statements of foreign writers who have disseminated this report throughout the whole length and breadth of the land. On the other hand, I cannot suffer a groundless and strange story to run so freely through the Christian community, and bring upon the poor innocent women of India such undeserved reproach. I do not wish to cover the really defective institutions of my country. Her religion, rather than custom, sanctions suicide in different ways, as manifested in the voluntary offering of the widows upon the funeral fire of their husbands. The throwing of babies into the Ganges or to the alligators, then, I would say never was in the customs or religious ordinances of India. I never heard of it even as a grandmother’s story; while, on the other hand, my mother and other friends often spoke of the widows who burned themselves alive with their dead husbands, of their preparation, their bidding farewell to their children, committing them to the care of some kind relative, etc. It seems strange to me, that, being a native of India, a Hindoo, yea, a Brahmun, by birth, I did not know nor hear of this custom of my own country, which is known to the people who live nearly eighteen thousand miles from the same. What did not come to my knowledge during my twenty-one years of life in India, came to my ear on the day I reached America. “What is this?” they ask me. “What do they mean?