16. The Holî festival marks approximately the time of the vernal equinox, ten days before the full moon of the Hindoo month Phâlgun. The day of the bonfire does not always fall on the 16th of March. It is not considered lucky to begin harvest till the Holî has been burnt. Mr. Crooke holds that 'on the whole, there seems to be some reason to believe that the intention to promote the fertility of men, animals, and crops, supplies the basis of the rites' ('The Holî, a Vernal Festival of the Hindus', _Folklore_, vol. xxv (1914), p. 83). I agree. 17. The pîpal-tree (_Ficus religiosa_, Linn.; _Urostigma religiosum_, Gasp.) is sacred to Vishnu, and universally venerated throughout India. 18. About four hundred thousand persons. 19. Two pice x 400,000 = 800,000 pice, = 200,000 annas, = 12,500 rupees. Even if the author's estimate of the numbers be much too large, the pecuniary result must have been handsome, not to mention the butter and flour. 20. Hindoo sacred books. CHAPTER 28 Pestle-and-Mortar Sugar-Mills--Washing away of the Soil. On the 13th [December, 1885] we came to Barwâ Sâgar,[1] over a road winding among small ridges and conical hills, none of them much elevated or very steep; the whole being a bed of brown syenite, generally exposed to the surface in a decomposing state, intersected by veins and beds of quartz rocks, and here and there a narrow and shallow bed of dark basalt. One of these beds of basalt was converted into grey syenite by a large granular mixture of white quartz and feldspar with the black hornblende. From this rock the people form their sugar-mills, which are made like a pestle and mortar, the mortar being cut out of the hornblende rock, and the pestle out of wood.[2]