The common life of the holy city began, and the calling of the milkmen, the cake-sellers, the fruiterers, and drivers of bullock-carts mingled with the temple bells. They brought the dead down to the river, hung with marigolds, and wrapped in cotton cloths as when they lived. Pushing them feet forwards a little way out from shore, they let them soak in the holy water until wooden pyres should be ready to consume their deserted forms, happy in a double purification. Washerwomen carried down their bundles of linen, and swung each piece over their heads again and again upon flat stones in the water, until it was cleansed, with the added advantage of sanctity. Ascetics in brick-dust robes passed up and down among the crowd, bearing long staves in memory of their vow to constrain their thoughts, their speech, and their desires. Other ascetics, dressed only in a transparent coating of ashes, sat in perpetual contemplation, forgetful of the body and the world. One man I saw in faded yellow robe, worn by sun and rain, passing quietly in and out of the worshipping throng, as he followed the little footpath by the water’s brink. He was of those who all the year long tread the bank of the Ganges, from her source in the mountains to her mouth among the forest swamps, and back again to her source in the mountains. On that day’s walk he happened to be passing again through her most sacred city, but that seemed hardly to interrupt his contemplation of her holiness. [Illustration: ON THE BANK. [_Face p. 264._ ] “Yours is the Order I should belong to by nature,” I said, giving him a halfpenny, for which he had not asked. “For you it would be easy and difficult,” he answered, in good English, and led me up many steps and along galleries overhanging a cliff of ruinous masonry to a cool courtyard, where Brahmans are daily fed on boiled rice and salt, laid out upon a plate of stitched banana leaves. “Obviously it would be easy for you as for any one,” he went on as we climbed up, after his meal, to the top of the flat roof where a little shelter had been erected for shade and worship; “but for you it would be difficult also, because you hang upon the world, and your soul is entangled in illusions and desires. Like all your people, you call the unreal things realities, and for reality you have no name.” Having devoted himself for a while to prayer, he continued: “You see this low parapet? Many years ago a boy was seated upon it reading a Sanscrit book of wisdom, when, it is thought, a monkey, inspired by the god, pushed him, and he fell. Look over and you will see the projecting slab half way down which he broke as he fell. They gathered up his shattered body, and laid it, almost alive, in the Ganges. I cannot doubt that he attained at once to salvation, his soul returning to the universal consciousness, as the space inside a pot returns to universal space when the pot is broken. And in his salvation I may claim a share, for I was his father.”