The fact that in India one of the wives generally occupies a position of far higher dignity than that held by the others will make Indian polygamy easy to destroy by the lapse of time and operation of social and moral causes. As the city-dwelling natives come to mix more with the Europeans, they will find that only one of their wives will be generally recognised. This will tend of itself to repress polygamy among the wealthy native merchants and among the rajahs who are members of our various councils, and their example will gradually react upon the body of the natives. Already a majority of the married people of India are monogamists by practice, although polygamists in theory; their marriages being limited by poverty, although not by law. The classes which have to be reached are the noble families, the merchants, and the priests; and over the two former European influence is considerable, while the inquiry into Koolinism has proved that the leading natives will aid us in repressing the abuses of polygamy among the priests.

CHAPTER X.

UMRITSUR.

AT Umbala, heard that the pilgrims returning from the sacred fair, or great Hindoo camp-meeting, at Hurdwar, had been attacked by cholera, and excluded from the town; and as I quitted Umbala in the evening, I came upon the cholerastricken train of pilgrims escaping by forced marches towards their homes-in many cases a thousand miles away. Tall, lithe, long-bearded men with large hooked noses, high foreheads, and thin lips, stalked along, leading by one hand their veiled women, who ran behind, their crimson and orange trousers stained with the dust of travel, while bullock-carts decked out with jingling bells bore the tired and the sick. Many children of all ages were in the throng. For mile after mile I drove through their ranks, as they marched with a strange kind of weary haste, with few halts, with little rest, if any. One great camp we left behind us, but only one; and all night long we were still passing ranks of marching men and women. The march was silent; there was none of the usual chatter of an Indian crowd; gloom was in every face, and the people strode along like a beaten army flying from a destroying foe.

The disease, indeed, was pressing on their heels. Two hundred men and women, as I was told at the Umbala lines, had died among them in the single day. Many had dropped from fright alone, but the pestilence was in the horde, and its seeds were carried into whatever villages the pilgrims reached.

The gathering at Hurdwar had been attended by a million people drawn from every part of the Punjaub and North-West :*

* Government returns have since shown that no less than 2,885,000 people were present at the fair.

not only Hindoos and Sikhs, but Scindhees, Beloochees, Pathans, and Afghans had their representatives in this great throng. As we neared the bridge of boats across the Sutlej, I found that a hurried quarantine had been set up on the spot. Only the sick or dying and bearers of corpses were detained, however; a few questions were asked of the remainder, and ultimately they were allowed to cross: but driving on at speed, I reached Jullundur in the morning, only to find that the pilgrims had been denied admittance to the town. A camp had been formed without the city, to which the pilgrims had to go, unless they preferred to straggle on along the roads, dropping and dying by the way; and the villagers throughout the country had risen on the wretched people, to prevent them returning to their homes.

It is not strange that the Government of India should lately have turned its attention to the regulation or suppression of these fairs, for the city-dwelling people of North India will not continue long to tolerate enormous gatherings at the commencement of the hot weather, by which the lives of thousands must ultimately be lost. At Hurdwar, at Juggernauth, and at many other holy spots, hundreds of thousands-millions, not infrequently-are collected yearly from all parts of India, Great princes come down travelling slowly from their capitals with trains of troops and followers so long that they often take a day or more to pass a given spot. The Maharajah of Cashmere's camp between Kalka and Umbala occupied when I saw it more space than that of Aldershot. Camels, women, suttlers without count, follow in the train, so that a body of five thousand men is multiplied until it occupies the space and requires the equipments of a vast army. A huge multitude of cultivators, of princes, of fakeers, and of roisterers met for the excitement and the pleasures of the camp, is gathered about the holy spot. There is religion, and there is trade; indeed, the religious pilgrims are for the most part shrewd traders, bent on making a good profit from their visit to the fair.

The gathering at Hurdwar in 1867 had been more than usually well attended and successful, when suddenly a rumour of cholera was heard; the police procured the break-up of the camp, and Government thought fit to prohibit the visit to Simla

of the Maharajah of Cashmere. The pilgrims had hardly left the camp upon their journey home when cholera broke out, and by the time I passed them hundreds were already dead, and a panic had spread through India. The cholera soon followed the rumour, and reached even to the healthiest hilltowns, and 6000 deaths occurred in the city of Srinuggur, after the Maharajah's return with his infected escort from Hurdwar. A Government which has checked infanticide and suppressed suttee could not fail to succeed, if it interfered, in causing these fairs to be held in the cold weather.

At Jullundur, I encountered a terrible dust-storm. It came from the south and west, and, to judge from its fierceness, must have been driven before the wind from the great sandy desert of Northern Scinde. The sun was rising for a sultry day, when from the south there came a blast which in a minute covered the sky with a leaden cloud, while from the horizon there advanced, more slowly, a lurid mass of reddish-brown. It soon reached the city, and then, from the wall where I sought shelter, nothing could be seen but driving sand of ochre colour, nothing heard but the shrieking of the wind. The gale ceased as suddenly as it began, but left a day which, delightful to travellers upon the Indian plains, would elsewhere have been called by many a hard name--a day of lowering sky and dropping rain, with chilling cold-in short, a day that felt and looked like an English thaw, though the thermometer must have stood at 75°. Another legacy from the storm was a view of the Himalayas such as is seldom given to the dwellers on the plains. Looking at the clouds upon the northern horizon, I suddenly caught sight of the Snowy Range hanging, as it seemed, above them, half-way up the skies. Seen with a foreground of dawk jungle in bright bloom, the picture was beautiful, but the view too distant to be grand, except through the ideas of immensity called up by the loftiness of the peaks. While crossing the Beeas (the ancient Hyphasis, and eastern boundary of the Persian empire in the days of Darius), as I had crossed the Sutlej, by a bridge of boats, I noticed that the railway viaduct, which was being built for the future Umritsur and Delhi line, stood some way from the deep water of the river; indeed, stood chiefly upon dry land. The rivers change their course so often that

the Beeas and Sutlej bridges will each have to be made a mile long. There has lately been given us in the Punjaub a singular instance of the blind confidence in which Government orders are carried out by the subordinates. The order was that the iron columns on which the Beeas bridge was to rest should each be forty-five feet long. In placing them, in some cases the bottom of the forty-five feet was in the shifting sand-in others, it was thirty feet below the surface of the solid rock; but a boring which was needless in the one case and worse than useless in the other has been persevered in to the end, the story runs, because it was the "hook'm." The Indian rivers are the great bars to road and railway making; indeed, except on the Grand Trunk road, it may be said that the rivers of India are still unbridged. On the chief mail-roads stone causeways are built across the river-beds, but the streams are all but impassable during the rains. Even on the road from Kalka to Umbala, however, there is one river-bed without a causeway, across which the dawk-gharree is dragged by bullocks, who struggle slowly through the sand; and, in crossing it, I saw a steam-engine lying half-buried in the drift.

In India, we have been sadly neglectful of the roads. The Grand Trunk road and the few great railroads are the only means of communication in the country. Even between the terminus of the Bengal lines at Jubbelpore and of the Bombay railroad at Nagpore there was at the time of my visit no metalled road, although the distance was but 200 miles, and the mails already passed that way. Half a day at least was lost upon all the Calcutta letters, and Calcutta passengers for Bombay or England were put to an additional expense of some £30 and a loss of a week or ten days in time from the absence of 200 miles of road. Until we have good cross-roads in India, and metalled roads into the interior from every railway station, we shall never succeed in increasing the trade of India, nor in civilizing its inhabitants. The Grand Trunk road is, however, the best in the world, and is formed of soft white nodules, found in beds through North India, which when pounded and mixed with water is known as "kunkur," and makes a road hard, smooth, clean, and lasting, not unlike that which asphalt gives.

At Umritsur, I first found myself in the true East-the East