assured they are not likely to outstrip him in the race for knowledge. And so it goes on from generation to generation, until now, when this wonderful innovator, Christianity, has walked right into the midst of this venerable ignorance, and, to the horror of these editorial oracles, has lifted many even of the Pariah youth of their bazaars to a plane of education and knowledge up to which millions look with amazement as they wonder what is going to happen now, when boys “whose fathers they would have disdained to set with the dogs in their flocks” are actually becoming possessed of an education which even their Pundits do not enjoy!
The habits of the India aristocracy are in many respects decidedly peculiar. The residence, for instance, is usually very mean, as compared with the wealth of the parties. While they will spend millions upon a temple or tomb, they are content to dwell in a house which a man in America, with one fiftieth of their income, would scorn to inhabit. A Rajah with a rent-roll of say fifty thousand dollars or more per annum will sometimes pass his life in a residence built of sun-dried brick, with a tiled roof, that cost less than two thousand dollars, surrounded on all sides with mud hovels, and in the midst of a bazaar where the din and smoke and effluvia would be intolerable to any decent American.
No doubt this want of appreciation of surrounding circumstances in their life is caused by their inability while heathens justly or truly to estimate that idea of home which Christianity has created for man, especially in the “honorable estate” of the married life which she ordains and blesses, and to which she leads the grateful, loving husband to bring his means and ingenuity to adorn it, to make it a convenient, cheerful, happy dwelling for the blessed wife whom he loves and the dear children whom God has given them. Such a home, with its joy and honor, the heathen or polygamist can never know or appreciate. His residence is but a convenience, not the sanctuary of the affections, and his estimate of home must be, and is, defective and perverted.
They eschew furniture, in our sense of the word—tables, chairs,
