Others pressed upon us pieces of filmy, gold-bordered Madras muslins, eight yards of which are required for a turban or a woman's sari. There were none of the ancient India muslins, those "floating mists," or "webs of the air," of which one has heard but never sees in this day of Manchester piece goods, steam-mills, and spindles.
Our Tamil servant, being a Christian, would not enter the heathen temple, so consigned us to a high-caste Brahman draped superbly in a white sheet, and striped between his eyebrows with the frowning mark of Shiva. Inside the temple compound, every forehead was freshly painted, breasts and arms striped and smeared with other hall-marks of piety. The black images were streaming with oil and butter, garlanded with chains of marigolds, and surrounded by abject worshipers. In that temple one may fully realize what heathenism and idolatry really are. One meets there the India of the Sunday-school books, and is appalled with the seeming hopelessness of the missionary's task, of the impossibility of ever making any impression upon such a people, of coping with such superstition. Yet the American Mission in Madura is one of the largest and most successful in India, and in this southern presidency one fifth of the people are Christians. Whole villages even are Christian, Syrian, Nestorian, and early Jesuit missionaries having labored there since the third and fourth centuries.
We could look down dark temple corridors to darker shrines, where faint lights glimmered and the highest-caste Brahmans were tending the images
