Various means of improvement are now open to the British subjects of India. The English residents in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay are among the most kind and liberal people in the world. Quite independent of the government establishments, they privately support a vast number of charitable institutions, and there is no end of societies for religious and other educational objects; and although the changes effected in the religious and social condition of the majority of the peoples since the occupation of India by the British are hardly perceptible, nevertheless some very important steps have been taken toward ensuring the good of the people at large, especially in the prohibition of sutteeism, infanticide, the terrific sacrifice of life that at one time characterized the festival of the god Juggernath, not to speak of the tortures of maddened fanatics and self-condemned ascetics, the horrible practices of the Thugs and that of the Meriahs of Orissa. All these savage practices are more or less repressed by the constant and vigilant operation of protective laws instituted by the British rulers. Before leaving Calcutta we paid a visit to the Khali Ghaut, and alighted before a great hall with a towering but ungainly roof above it. This was the famous temple of the black goddess Kali. There was something more entangled, enchanted, and demon-like about this building and its interior than any other that I had ever entered in India. It was the festival of Juggernath. A number of white-robed priests were preparing to place the grim goddess in a car and to lead her forth to grace the festival. The temple consisted of a vast number of low pillars; it was dimly lighted, and, although light was flooding the earth everywhere in great splendor, it was not allowed to enter here, but it worked its way hither and thither and quivered dubiously in unearthly tints on the face of the black goddess dimly visible in the distance. A more hideous and repulsive image can hardly be conceived by the heart of man than this veritable female fiend after whom the city of Calcutta is still named. No one seemed to object to our entering the temple, so we walked down the dim aisles and stood face to face with the grim and terrible Kali. It would be impossible to give utterance to the sense of horror that crept over me as I looked at this strange, enigmatic deity of the Bengalees. The black face was surmounted by long hair which had the appearance of innumerable serpents; a red tongue protruded from the hideous mouth; the expression of the eyes was strange and fierce, almost to madness; she was furnished with four arms, in one of which she grasped a knife and in the other the head of a man; in another pair of hands higher up she held a lotos and the _chakra_, or the wheel. Round her neck hung the skulls of murdered victims, and she stood on the body of a prostrate man, who is represented trumpeting forth her praises even while she is in the act of crushing him to death.