hour upon the water's edge, where they are just lapped by the stream, and the pyre is lighted by a near male relation from a sacred fire, the monopoly of which is held by a man of the servile dom caste. The scene is neither impressive nor repulsive, and as a spectacle may take rank among one's disappointments of travel. One may see as many as three or four fires alight at once, and unless the breeze happens to puff a smoky heavy odour of burnt fat in the direction of the boat, which may be moored as closely up to the scene as desired, there is absolutely nothing to tell one that the cremation of human remains is going on.
It is of course only the wealthy who can take their dead to Benares, or the almost equally sacred Gya, to be burned, and so the scene may be witnessed in any town or village that one looks for it. Indeed the Malabari Brahmans have an axiom that the corpse of a man or woman should always be burnt in their own compounds. But it may be possible even to the poorest to be able in time to cast the ashes upon the broad bosom of Mother Ganga, or in the sanctified branches of the Kaveri at Birunelli in the Wynaad, and Perur in Coimbatore, and, until opportunity offers, the remains can be piously preserved in an urn at home. The advantage, according to Brahmanical ideas, of casting the ashes upon a sacred stream, is that a body, provided all orthodox prayers have been recited, passes into the keeping of Radra (one of Siva's many forms), and his cares cease when the burning is complete. All that is left after the incineration is pure, and therefore belongs of right to another of Siva's incarnation, Paramesvaran, who is reached through the holy waters. I heard in Calcutta of a curious instance of the way in which the orthodox are beginning to adapt the resources of Western innovation to the assistance of their religious rites in a
