river with their families, had fixed up certain screens in the water, which enabled them to bathe unseen. Presently the dusky body of the moon began to obscure a portion of the burning disk of the superior planet, and in a moment a tremendous shout arose from the multitude, who then plunged several times into the stream, muttering during the intervals an abundance of prayers, raising their eyes and their hands towards the sun, sprinkling water in the air, bowing the head, and practising a thousand gesticulations. These ceremonies continued to the end of the eclipse, when, throwing pieces of money far into the stream, putting on new garments, some leaving the old ones, besides the gifts which in common with all others they bestowed, for the Brahmins, others retaining them, the whole multitude dispersed.
The Hindoos, however, were not singular in the superstitious feelings with which they regarded eclipses of the sun. Twelve years previous Bernier had witnessed the effects which one of these phenomena produced in his own country, where the madness exhibited itself in the guise of fear. Astrologers, possessing the confidence of the Fates, had predicted that the end of the world, that unfailing bugbear of the middle age, was now to take place, and the terrified rabble of all ranks, conscious of guilt, or oppressed by gloomy fanaticism, immediately crept, like rats, into their cellars, or dark closets, as if God could not have beheld them there; or else rushed headlong to the churches, with a piety begotten by apprehension. Others, who only anticipated some malignant and perilous influence, swallowed drugs, which were vaunted by their inventors as sovereign remedies against the eclipse disease! Thus it appears that the superstition of the Hindoos was the less despicable of the two.
During his long residence in India our traveller twice visited Bengal. Of his first journey into that
