[Illustration:  HINDOO VILLAGE TEMPLES.]

In the immediate vicinity of each village, and often in the village itself, is a small temple sacred to Vishnu or Shiva.  It is often perched high up on some bank, overlooking the lake or village tank.  Generally there is some umbrageous old tree overshadowing the sacred fane, and seated near, reclining in the shade, are several oleaginous old Brahmins.  If the weather be hot, they generally wear only the dhote or loin cloth made of fine linen or cotton, and hanging about the legs in not ungraceful folds.  The Brahmin can be told by his sacred thread worn round the neck over the shoulder.  His skin is much fairer than the majority of his fellow villagers.  It is not unfrequently a pale golden olive, and I have seen them as fair as many Europeans.  They are intelligent men with acute minds, but lazy and self-indulgent.  Frequently the village Brahmin is simply a sensual voluptuary.  This is not the time or place to descant on their religion, which, with many gross practices, contains not a little that is pure and beautiful.  The common idea at home that they are miserable pagans, ‘bowing down to stocks and stones,’ is, like many of the accepted ideas about India, very much exaggerated.  That the masses, the crude uneducated Hindoos, place some faith in the idol, and expect in some mysterious way that it will influence their fate for good or evil, is not to be denied, but the more intelligent natives, and most of the Brahmins, only look on the idol as a visible sign and symbol of the divinity.  They want a vehicle to carry their thoughts upwards to God, and the idol is a means to assist their thoughts heavenward.  As works of art their idols are not equal to the fine pictures and other symbols of the Greeks or the Roman Catholics, but they serve the same purpose.  Where the village is very poor, and no pious founder has perpetuated his memory, or done honour to the gods by erecting a temple, the natives content themselves with a rough mud shrine, which they visit at intervals and daub with red paint.  They deposit flowers, pour libations of water or milk, and in other ways strive to shew that a religious impulse is stirring within them.  So far as I have observed, however, the vast mass of the poor toilers in India have little or no religion.  Material wants are too pressing.  They may have some dumb, vague aspirations after a higher and a holier life, but the fight for necessaries, for food, raiment, and shelter, is too incessant for them to indulge much in contemplation.  They have a dim idea of a future life, but none of them can give you anything but a very unsatisfactory idea of their religion.  They observe certain forms and ceremonies, because their fathers did, and because the Brahmins tell them.  Of real, vital, practical religion, as we know it, they have little or no knowledge.  Ask any common labourer or one of the low castes about immortality, about salvation, about the higher virtues,