With Government bridges lacking the strength to resist the impetuosity of more than ordinarily boisterous freshets, there may always be a surprise in store for the pilgrim to the Boro Budoor who has arrived at the first station, the Mendoot: will he or will he not find the means to cross? For, in time of _banjir_, _i.e._ when the river is in spate, the primitive ferry which maintains the communication in lieu of better, a bambu raft or two frail barges fastened together, fails as to both comfort and safety, and after heavy rains large groups of men and women can often be seen waiting for the turbulent waters to quiet down a bit. Lord Kitchener visited the Mendoot in December, 1909, during a bridgeless spell and conditions generally inauspicious to his proceeding a mile and a half farther to the Boro Budoor. Otherwise the being ferried over in company of gaily dressed people going to or coming from market with fruit, garden produce and all sorts of merchandise for sale or bought, has its compensations; rocked by the eddying stream which glides swiftly between its steep banks, our dominating sensation is one of joy in the splendour of unstinted light, of freedom from the petty torments of everyday routine,--and let worry take care of itself! As we climb the opposite shore, comes the mysteriously grateful feeling of being enveloped in the soil’s genial exhalation of warm contentment, the fertile earth’s response to the passionate embrace of the sun. Their espousal, their connubial ardour appears incorporate in the _chandi_ Dapoor,[136] a petrified spark of universal love, a wonder of structural and decorative skill in a shady grove some hundred paces to the right of the road.[137] And again the _spiritus mundi_ is symbolically interpreted in the story of yond temple betrothed and wedded to the tree. They were very much smitten with each other, the _chandi_ Pawon and a _randu alas_[138] living in the hamlet Brajanala. They married and the pretty comedy of affection turned into tragedy: as chances very often in the case of a weaker and a stronger partner in the matrimonial game, the latter throve and prospered at the expense of the former. Now of his brothers there were and still are many exactly like him, but of her sisters there were only few and none of her peculiar kind of beauty, and since it seemed a pity that she should waste her singular comeliness in supporting a husband of no particular worth for all his bigness and parade of protecting her, a divorce was resolved upon which meant his sentence of death. Voices in favour of reprieve or commutation of the penalty were disregarded: what did one _randu alas_ more or less matter compared with the preservation of the exquisite _chandi_ Pawon, sole surviving representative of her class? So the tree was cut down and she escaped happily the fate which overtook the _chandis_ Perot and Pringapoos. The _chandi_ Pawon was even wholly