From every part of India, by day and night, the pilgrims come, and the roads to the great temple, by the sea at Puri, are always open and always thronged. The pilgrims come from behind the white mountains, and from the purple lands of the south, and across the hot plains from the other ocean. The train that shot me out upon the sand amid a crowd of dim white figures at three o’clock one morning raises a high dividend from religion. Hundreds come by it every day, for it saves time—and under British rule even devotion goes by time. But worshippers still think it more religious and purifying to make the whole journey on foot, visiting other sacred temples upon the road, bathing in holy rivers, and turning at every dawn towards the rising sun, as all mankind instinctively turn for worship, just as for love we turn towards the sunset. To take years upon the journey only extends the glory of expectation, and if you have the holy patience to travel the Grand Trunk Road, measuring every two yards of its thousand miles by prostrating your body along the dust, what is space, what is time, when you are on the way to God? [Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF EQUALITY. [_Face p. 152._ ] Children and young mothers come if the entire family sets out for holiness, but the best time for the great act of worship is late in middle-age, when for many years the field has been sown and reaped, the buffalo fed, the taxes paid, the children tended, the cotton garment daily washed. Then the present career upon this visible world is almost over, the shadowy gate to the next stage upward is almost in sight. Then men and women long to go on pilgrimage, and, untouched by the cares of fortune, family, or any transitory things, they travel forth in calm elation of soul, their thoughts fixed only on the lasting realities of eternity, till they hear the thud of the long waves upon the sand, and before them rises the great white tower of the Lord of the Universe, surmounted by its wheel and flag. There stands at length the beatific vision, there the end of all these labours, the revelation of the Divine Essence for which they had waited so many years of repeated seasons in the fields.