“Such was the picture that presented to the strained, incredulous eyes of Immalee, those mingled features of magnificence and horror,--of joy and suffering,--of crushed flowers and mangled bodies,--of magnificence calling on torture for its triumph,--and the steam of blood and the incense of the rose, inhaled at once by the triumphant nostrils of an incarnate demon, who rode amid the wrecks of nature and the spoils of the heart! Immalee gazed on in horrid curiosity. She saw, by the aid of the telescope, a boy seated on the front of the moving temple, who “perfected the praise” of the loathsome idol, with all the outrageous lubricities of the Phallic worship. From the slightest consciousness of the meaning of this phenomenon, her unimaginable purity protected her as with a shield. It was in vain that the tempter plied her with questions, and hints of explanation, and offers of illustration. He found her chill, indifferent, and even incurious. He gnashed his teeth and gnawed his lip _en parenthese_. But when she saw mothers cast their infants under the wheels of the car, and then turn to watch the wild and wanton dance of the Almahs, and appear, by their open lips and clapped hands, to keep time to the sound of the silver bells that tinkled round their slight ankles, while their infants were writhing in their dying agony,--she dropt the telescope in horror, and exclaimed, “The world that thinks does not feel. I never saw the rose kill the bud!” “But look again,” said the tempter, “to that square building of stone, round which a few stragglers are collected, and whose summit is surmounted by a trident,--that is the temple of Maha-deva, a goddess who possesses neither the power or the popularity of the great idol Juggernaut. Mark how her worshippers approach her.” Immalee looked, and saw women offering flowers, fruits, and perfumes; and some young girls brought birds in cages, whom they set free; others, after making vows for the safety of some absent, sent a small and gaudy boat of paper, illuminated with wax, down the stream of an adjacent river, with injunctions never to sink till it reached him. “Immalee smiled with pleasure at the rites of this harmless and elegant superstition. “This is not the religion of torment,” said she.--“Look again,” said the stranger. She did, and beheld those very women whose hands had been employed in liberating birds from their cages, suspending, on the branches of the trees which shadowed the temple of Maha-deva, baskets containing their new-born infants, who were left there to perish with hunger, or be devoured by the birds, while their mothers danced and sung in honour of the goddess.