Mohammedan and Hindu customs are so much alike that it is often hard to say that one is a Mohammedan custom or that another is purely Hindu. At the marriages, and the return of the daughter to her home to give birth to her first child, at the birth of the children, and in many of the social customs of the Mohammedans are seen the influence of the Hindu religion. It was the Mohammedans who brought the “purdah” system, or the seclusion of women, into India. Before the invasion of these warlike people the women of India went about freely, but now the Hindus are practically as secluded as are the Mohammedan women. In the North, where the influence of the followers of the Arabian prophet made itself most dominant, the women are much more secluded than in the South, where the Mohammedans did not come in such large numbers. It is in the villages that true India is to be found, unchanging, languorous India. Here is a self-centered commonwealth, with little dependence for its welfare upon the outer world, and the people have remained the same as their fathers and their father’s fathers, impervious to new innovations and ideas. To look at one of these villages is very different from ideas one may have formed of them by reading books of travel. The first impression received upon entering one is that of an enlarged barnyard, as cows and farm implements take entire possession of the narrow streets. The low, thatched mud houses are without doors, windows, or chimneys. The floor is generally plastered with cow dung, which, when dry, leaves a hard shellac-like polish, considered by the natives most sanitary. It has to be redone every two weeks, and to Western eyes is a most unsightly operation, as it is done with the hands of the housewife. It is said that when the Salvation Army sent its first volunteers to India, they required them to live the life of the Indian, and that this smearing of the earthen floors with the national substitute for varnish was one of the chief causes why women were not always ready to volunteer for service in the East.