Now the fine-split wood is piled up into a new pyre about six feet long, two feet wide, and two and one-half feet high, and four men bring the corpse of a man on a bier. It is covered with a white sheet, which is taken away, so as to leave only a small piece of cloth covering the corpse. This is the body of a Fakir, a stately man with fine features, and past the prime of life. As soon as the body is placed on the pyre, two Brahmins pile fine-split wood around and over it so that only the face is visible. Then comes the eldest son of the deceased and rubbing the face with fresh butter lays several lumps of it on the pyre. He then walks three times around the corpse and lights with a fire-brand a whisk of straw in his father's pyre. The fire spreads rapidly through the dry wood. The melting butter flows through it, the flames roar and crackle, and the dead body makes writhing muscular motions under the influence of the fire, the skin bursting open in several places, and a thin fluid trickling out which adds fuel to the flames. The face shrinks and vanishes under our eyes, an unpleasant smell of burnt flesh permeates the air, and in a little while all is over, and the Brahmins gather the ashes and scatter them on the waters of the sacred Ganges. Who can wonder that a stranger, witnessing such a ceremony, experiences in his own breast questions and surmises such as these: Is this, then, all? Where is the Fakir who mortified his body by all kinds of torture, who struggled and suffered in order to become acceptable to the gods? Was there nothing more than that shell, consumed before our eyes? Is the man who spent half of his life-time gazing into the boundless realm of space and yearning and longing for the unknown, the infinite, no longer in existence? Was his longing only a mockery, or was it a foreshadowing of that which is to come? What would life be if all terminated in the pyre or in the grave? To what purpose, then, all noble endeavors, whose aim and object only relate to the uncertain future? The deepest premonitions of the human soul, and the most beautiful hopes of the heart, how far are these from the thought that all our feelings, our loftiest ambitions,--in one word the best part of our being,--can be annihilated in a crematory! The Fakir whose body was now reduced to ashes had lived in the faith of his immortality, had worshiped the deities of his people, because he knew no better, but was he on that account less welcome in the everlasting mansions?