AUTUMN FESTIVAL
It was the tenth day of the bright moon and the last day of the Autumn Festival. Worship was performed in every temple, and also in many houses of the rich. Men in gay dresses issued from their villages and flocked to the town. Hundreds of women bathed in the Ganges at sunrise, and hundreds of little children paraded the streets to the sound of music. Altogether the little town presented an aspect of that joyousness and merriment which is observed in the East on all festive occasions.
Nobo Kumar had provided a grand entertainment in the afternoon for the thousands of villagers who had assembled. At the close of the rains, when the streams and rivers of Bengal are full, the cultivators amuse themselves by boat races, in which they are experts. Long narrow boats, constructed for speed and manned by sixteen or twenty rowers, skim over the water with almost incredible speed; and before the invention of steam these boats were unsurpassed in quickness. Village competes with village, and town with town, and it is scarcely possible to depict the excitement of the rowers who engage in such races or the delight of the thousands of people who witness them.
By ancient custom such races were annually held at Birnagar on the last day of the Autumn Festival, and Nobo Kumar had arranged that the races of this year—the last year of his stay at Birnagar—should be on a scale of magnificence unprecedented in the annals of Birnagar.
Early in the afternoon the eastern shore of the Ganges, on which Birnagar stood, was crowded by twenty thousand sightseers. Pavilions had been
73
