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gates, and toward sundown the great square of the caravansary was full of groaning camels, and the loads of merchandise grew to mountain heights. A fountain and a sacred spot of prayer is reserved in the center of the serai, and there caravan-men and camel-drivers cleansed and prayed, their faces to the west, oblivious of all the acre of protesting beasts and wrangling men, screaming peddlers, chanting beggars, and even the shouts of a bear-leader, who danced and wrestled with his shaggy pet to the very edges of the prayer-carpets. The serai's inclosure, the Ghor Kattri, has always been holy ground. On this spot first stood the great vihara of Kanishka's time that was four hundred feet high and a quarter of a mile in circumference, chief fane when all this valley was head center of Buddhism. To it came Pahien and Hiouen Thsang, those Chinese pilgrims of the fifth and seventh centuries, who, crossing Tatary and Turkestan, came down through the Khyber Pass to visit the holy lands of the Buddhist faith. In their time, too, a great suburban stupa sheltered the golden begging-bowl of Sakya-Muni, "the holy grail of Eastern legends," which, brought here from Benares, was carried to Persia, and then is said to have been looted by a marauder and taken to Kandahar; and Mohammedans treasure the so-called Buddha's bowl—a great bronze or iron caldron. Peshawar once had its Bodhi-druma (Tree of Knowledge), descendant of the Bo-tree at Buddha-Gaya, planted by Kanishka, the Scythian ruler of the Panjab, according to one legend; it had already grown