and too often want of consideration flows from want of intimacy. A Zillah District is in extent somewhat like an English county, and usually contains an area of two or three thousand square miles, and a population of one or two millions. "The Collector is separated by an impassable gulf from the people of the country," says Sir J. B. Phear; and he adds, "to the eyes of a native, the English official is an incomprehensible being, inaccessible, selfish, overbearing, irresistible." This statement is made with reference to the Bengal Presidency, and it applies in its full force to that of Madras. The Collector is paid from the taxes two or three thousand pounds sterling a year, and retires with an annual pension of a thousand pounds.

At Madura the American Board has a very efficient mission, with valuable schools. It was founded in 1834; since which time it has covered the entire province with a network of stations. It includes one hundred and thirtyeight congregations, a hundred native missionaries, and a hundred native teachers. The institution of boarding-schools, peculiar to missions in Southern India, was introduced by the American Board, and there are in the Madura province one hundred and eighteen schools and training colleges.

In India, even in the coolest season, if you want coolness, you must rise early. It was New Year's morning, and the bright stars of the Southern Cross were still shining, when we drove in the missionary's conveyance to the railway station and took the early train one hundred miles northwards for Trichinopoly, a city often taken and retaken in the wars between the French and English in the last century. The sun rose in a clear sky at 6.30,

TRICHINOPOLY.

and hills sweeping up from the plain were kindled by his beams. The peasants were already at work like dark skeletons upon the land, employed chiefly in lifting water from wells and tanks by means of long bamboo levers, and pouring it into trenches cut through the rice-fields. Long before we arrived the famous rock of TRICHINOPOLY was in view before us, and we

abruptly five hundred feet above the sea, and towering two hundred and fifty feet over the town. Half way up is a temple to Siva, cut in the rock and built against it. We climbed stair after stair, and up the last dangerous flight of steps cut in the bare precipitous rock, without banister or rail, to the Mandepam or pavilion on the summit, a temple to the god Ganesh.

Here there presents itself a clear and extensive view in every direction over the wide-spreading plain, northwards over Seringham, east to Tanjore, south and west over the town, where the streets were all alive with a Mohammedan procession and the beating of drums. Outside the town to the south-west lay the military cantonments, where about five thousand troops are kept; and to the west are the chapels, monasteries and nunneries of the Roman Catholics. Almost all the Tamil servants are said to be Romanists. The Lutherans too have missions here, called the Leipzig Mission, and the new Lutheran church is a conspicuous object. They recognise the laws of caste among their converts. Immediately at the foot of the rock is the chapel in which the well-known missionary, C. F. Schwartz, preached. The old pulpit from which he so often proclaimed the message of Christ to the natives is still there. His influence with the native population was irresistible. In their transactions with the English they would treat only through him. He was born in Germany, on the 26th of October, 1726, and died at Tanjore, on the 14th of February, 1789, "revered," as the tablet in his church there says, "by Christian, Mohammedan, and Hindu alike." He left three thousand converts to Christianity behind him, in Tanjore alone. The remains of another famous Indian missionary, Bishop Heber, lie here in St. John's Church. He died suddenly at Trichinopoly, in 1826, when taking a cold bath, in the forty-third year of his age.

A three miles' drive northwards from Trichinopoly brings you to the famous Dravidian temples of SERINGHAM, the largest in all India. Seringham is a river-island formed by the Kâveri, which, rising far away in the Nilgiri Hills, about five miles above Trichinopoly divides into two branches. The Great Pagoda in the island thus formed is seven miles in circumference, and includes many bazaars and streets of Brahmans' houses, so that it is more like a walled town than a temple. The sight of the fourteen magnificent gate towers or gopuras from the outside is very impressive. Each has huge monoliths of granite on either side, the portico about forty feet high; and above the majestic gateways are pyramids of elaborate stone carving towering up to the height of two hundred feet. You drive through a succession of these gopuras, and alighting, you enter on foot a great choultry or pillared hall whose flat stone roof, fifteen feet high, is supported by one thousand columns, each a single block of granite, and all carved into grotesque figures of men and horses, men mounted upon rearing horses, and spearing tigers, and the like. Beyond is the central shrine, dark and dismal, but surmounted by a golden dome. Near to this four sacred elephants are stabled, and a staircase leads up to the flat stone roof which covers all these acres. The highest gopura was ascended by the Prince of Wales during his tour through India in 1875, and he left a gift of five hundred rupees to the temple. The contrast between the vastness, majesty and grandeur of the temple precincts, embodying the skill and toil of thousands of labourers and