was pretty well for the bride, aged eleven, who had long since been put to bed and was probably dreaming of a new doll; nor need the guests have looked so like the famous

"Party in the parlour,

All silent and all damned.”

This was for most of them a first appearance. They had dropped in casually, might drop out when the thing became absolutely unbearable.

But for the bridegroom the business had commenced on the previous Friday night and would not conclude till the Thursday night following. There would be some diversion on the morrow, since then he would set forth for the bride's house at the head of a goodly procession, and would make believe to bear the coy maiden off in spite of the tears of her mother and the threats of her father. But at night "from 9 to 12" this dreary business would go on again, with the solemnly pirouetting Nautch girl, her waving hands, her mechanical glances to right and left, and her harsh voice uplifted in pursuit of a lover too shrewd to allow himself to be caught. There would be the tom-tom man, the man with the fiddle, and the man with the bells, playing without cessation. There would be the uncle going round with the betel nuts, the stream of guests smilingly entering and gladly going.

As he thought of these things the bridegroom's heavy eyelids drooped from sheer weariness, and he yawned till he shook the garland of jewels that glistened on his neck. I should like to have taken him out into the backyard for a game of marbles, or for ten ecstatic minutes with a top; but fate had called him to higher duties, and with gallant attempts to keep his eyelids propped up and to suppress a yawn, he sat it out.

The company in the hall was exclusively composed of men, but through closely latticed windows at the upper end glimpses were caught of black eyes and white teeth, and there was heard the murmur of female voices. On a cross-bench at the top of the hall was a Rajah, a handsome man, splendidly dressed, who, with hand resting on the jewelled hilt of his sword, sat impassive as far as his body was concerned. But his bright black eyes were never still, roaming restlessly over this company and taking in every detail.

Shortly after eleven the Nautch girl began to wake up. She had caught sight of the judiciously retreating lover, and, uplifting her voice, proclaimed the happy chance. As she sang she advanced with slowly regulated paces up the hall, the orchestra following her, and the tomtom man, with well-simulated interest,

crying, "Ha! ha!" when the maiden reiterated, "I see him now." The climax seemed to have arrived, and having come to see a Nautch dance, I expected the dance was about to begin. But except that the girl waved her hands and body and now and then slowly revolved, there was no more motion than during the earlier portion of the performance.

There is a vague notion in the Western mind that Nautch is the Indian rendering of naughty. The worst thing that could be said against this Nautch dance by one of the chief professors in India was that it was unapproachably and inexpressibly dull. As to decency, the girl wore more clothes than would fit out the inhabitants of a Japanese village. Her heavily embroidered robe nearly reached the ground, displaying below a pair of trousers so long that they showed only the silver-ringed toes and draggled away at the heels, fully a foot too long. There were apparently no arrangements for pockets, for the girl kept her handkerchief in a convenient place between the two small drums that form the tom-tom. She made no scruple when necessity arose of taking this out, using it, and returning it; but always with graceful movements of the body and pretty waving of small, shapely hands, jewelled to the finger-tips. By

11.30 we had had enough, and left amid a succession of yawns from the bridegroom which threatened to have a fatal effect, and so bring the proceedings to a premature close.

On the next day, following the natural sequence of services in the prayer-book, I went to see a Parsee funeral. The Towers of Silence stand on a hill overlooking Bombay and the long stretch of water known as Back Bay. The situation is one of the most favoured in the neighbourhood of the city, and the hill is dotted with the houses of European residents who do not too much like the contiguity of these awesome Towers. But the Parsees were here first, and it cannot be said that either their burial-place or their funeral service is obstrusive. From the road below, the Towers are invisible, and only a vulture slowly sailing through the sultry air reminds one of their propinquity.

There are five towers in all, made from a common model. They are twenty-five feet high, the diameter being seventy-five feet. Within the roofless tower is a sloping platform marked out in three divisions. Within the outer ring are placed the corpses of men; women are laid in grooves formed in the second circle, and children in the third. With the exception of the top, always open to the heavens,

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32

there is only one entrance to the tower. This is by a doorway made in the thick walls, through which the corpse-bearers enter and deposit the naked body in its appointed place. As soon as they retire the vultures who have been waiting for their meal, impatient of the scant ceremonies that precede its setting forth, swoop down and begin their work.

No human eye has beheld the ghastly spectacle. The silence and the solitude of the towers are broken only by the presence and hideous bustle of the birds of prey; but it is known that within half an hour of the body's being laid out in the tower, nothing is left but the skeleton. Eight days later, by which time the bones are thoroughly dried, the corpsebearers return, take up the relics and cast them in a well in the centre of the tower, where in process of years they become decomposed, and absolutely nothing is left of what was once

man or woman.

For two hundred years the Parsees, living together in Bombay, have here found their last resting-place, their dust mingling in a common tomb, undivided in death as they were bound together in life. Yet in all these years it has not been found necessary to clear out the wells by reason of overcrowding. It is customary for a man or woman to be buried