The Parsees have but few festivals; the birthday of Zoroaster and their New Year's Day are the most important. The former is held in the month of October, and it is a sight worth seeing. The men, women, and children, magnificently dressed in gold-wrought silks and flashing jewels, crowd the Fire-temples with offerings of fruit and flowers. Long processions of priests robed in pure white take turns in officiating, and chant after chant ascends from the temples to the shining Ahura-Mazda, accompanied with invocations to the spirits of the righteous dead, and to the seven high angels around the throne. The beautiful half-veiled women, the lovely children, the noble-looking fathers of families with their numberless sons standing at their right hand, and the priests magnifying and feeding the sacred flame from sunrise to sunset, form a sight as inspiring as it is novel. Their Noow Rooz, or New Year's Day, is observed very much as we do ours. The poor and destitute of all castes and creeds have alms, food, and clothes distributed to them by the rich and great, poor relations receive presents, and among friends kindly visits and gifts are exchanged. The costume of this peculiar people is exceedingly simple, and said to be made obligatory on them by the rajah of Sajan on their first landing on Indian soil. That of the man consists of a long seamless muslin or silk shirt or tunic reaching to the knees, a woollen girdle with tassels, and a pair of silk trousers; when going out he puts on a sort of tunic, with a short silk vest over it; the modern Parsee gentlemen has also adopted shoes and stockings. The cap or turban by which a Parsee is distinguished is bound round a frame in the form of a little round tower, slightly higher on the right side. The stuff of which it is constructed is a peculiar manufacture made at Surat expressly for the Parsee turban. It is a sort of stiff paper-muslin, figured, and generally of a dark-red or chocolate color, bound round the frame smoothly, till it is made to assume this one particular form of a conical tower (typical of their earliest Fire-temple), around which emeralds and rubies are arranged on great festal occasions. The Parsee women that I met and visited in Bombay were, on the whole, remarkably good-looking as girls; before they conceal their fine curly hair they are really beautiful, and the children among the loveliest and happiest to be found in the East.