Later on we saw the same illustration again, lighted up like a great transparency, the focus for a thousand eyes. For on the dais of the barge, in the place of honour nearest the idols, stood three women and a child. The women were swathed in fold upon fold of rich violet silk, sprinkled all over with tinsel and gold; they were crowned with white flowers, wreathed round a golden ornament like a full moon set in their dark hair; and the effect of the whole, seen in the luminous flush of colour thrown upon them from the shore, was as if the night sky sparkling with stars had come down and robed them where they stood. Then when it paled, and sheet-lightning played, as it seemed, across water and barge and shrine, the effect was wholly mysterious. The three swaying forms--for they swayed keeping time to the music that never ceased--resembled one's idea of goddesses rather than familiar womenkind. To the Indian mind it was beautiful, bewilderingly beautiful; and the simple country-folk around drew deep breaths of admiration as they passed. The little girl looked more human. She too was in violet silk and spangles and gold, and her little head was wreathed with flowers. It may have been her first Floating Festival, for she gazed about her with eyes full of guileless wonder, and the woman beside whom she stood laid a light, protecting hand upon her shoulder. That little child! How the sight of her held us in pity as the barge sailed slowly round. She was so near to us at times that we could almost have touched her when the barge came near the wall; and yet she was utterly remote, miles of space might have lain between; it was as if we and she belonged to different planets. And yet our little ones who might have been as she, were so close--we could almost feel their loving little arms round our necks at that moment--this child, how far away she was! Had one of us set foot on the place where she stood, the friendly thousands about us would have changed in a second into indignant furies, and so long as the memory of such impiety remained no white face would have been welcome at the Floating Festival. We stood by the wall awhile and watched; the sorrow of it all sank into us. There in the holiest place of all, according to their thinking, close to the emblems of deity, they had set this grievous perversion of the holy and the pure. Right on the topmost pinnacle of everything known as religious there they had enthroned it, and robed it in starlight and crowned it as queens are crowned. "Oh, worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness!" "One thing have I desired of the Lord . . . to behold the fair beauty of the Lord"--such words open chasms of contrast. God pity them; like those of old, they know not what they do.