274 ^FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY
as may once have reached her on foot or in boats in the course of a year. Thus a forest of needs has grown up in modern Benares, of which the past generations with their common-sense, their spontaneous kindliness, and their thrifty municipal management, knew nothing.
Poor working-folk come, when the last hope has failed them, trusting that the Great God will be their refuge in his own city. In the old days, when Benares was a wealthy capital, these would have made their way to some house or para inhabited by well-to-do townsfolk from their own district, and through their kind offices work would sooner or later have been found. But now they find themselves amongst strangers. The music of temple-bells is the only sound familiar to them. Priests and fellow-worshippers are alike unknown. And it may be that in the sanctuary-city they have but fled from one despair to another.
Or the poor student comes here to learn. In the old days he would have found housp-room as well as food in the home of his guru, or of some wealthy patron, and if he fell ill, he would have been cared for there, as a member of the family. To-day the number of so-called students is great, and posisibly amongst them the indolent are many. For certainly temptations must have multiplied, at the same time that the moral continuity of the old relation between distant homestead and metropoli- tan /«r« has been lost. In any case, even amongst the most earnest, some of these poor students have,
