After a long, dusty drive in the suburbs of Delhi one day I crept into the grateful shade of a dak bungalow, found a comfortable chair and called for some soda to wash down the dust and biscuits to hold my appetite down until dinner time.  I was sipping the cool drink, nibbling the biscuits and enjoying the breeze that was blowing through the room, when the attendant handed me a board about as big as a shingle with a hole drilled through the upper end so that it could be hung on a wall.  Upon the board was pasted a notice printed in four languages, English, German, French and Hindustani, giving the regulations of the place, and the white-robed khitmatgar pointed his long brown finger to a paragraph that applied to my case.  I paid him 10 cents for an hour’s rest under the roof.  It was a satisfaction to do so.  The place was clean and neat and in every way inviting.

At many of the railway stations beds are provided by the firm of caterers who have a contract for running the refreshment-rooms.  Most of the stations are neat and comfortable, and you can always find a place to spread your bedding and lie down.  There is a big room for women and a big room for men.  Sometimes cots are provided, but usually only hard benches around the walls.  There are always washrooms and bathrooms adjoining, which, of course, are a great satisfaction in that hot and perspiring land.  The restaurants at the railway stations are usually good, and are managed by a famous caterer in Calcutta, but the men who run the trains don’t always give you time enough to eat.

On the passenger trains, ice, soda water, ginger ale, beer and other soft drinks are carried by an agent of the eating-house contractor, who furnishes them for 8 cents a bottle, and it pays him to do so, for an enormous quantity is consumed during the hot weather.  The dust is almost intolerable and you cannot drink the local water without boiling and filtering it.  The germs of all kinds of diseases are floating around in it at the rate of 7,000,000 to a spoonful.  A young lady who went over on the ship with us didn’t believe in any such nonsense and wasn’t afraid of germs.  She drank the local water in the tanks on the railway cars and wherever else she found it, and the last we heard of her she was in a hospital at Benares with a serious case of dysentery.

[Illustrations:  Group of famous Brahmin pundits]

Mark Twain says that there is no danger from germs in the sacred water of the Ganges, because it is so filthy that no decent microbe will live in it; and that just about describes the situation.  It is a miracle that the deaths are so few.  Millions of people fill their stomachs from that filthy stream day after day because the water washes away their sins, and I do not suppose there is a dirtier river in all the universe, nor one that contains more contagion and filth.  It receives the sewage of several of the largest cities of India.  Dead bodies of human beings as well as animals can be seen floating daily.  From one end of it to the other are burning ghats where the bodies of the dead are soaked in it before they are placed upon the funeral pyres, and when the bones and flesh are consumed the ashes are cast upon the sacred stream.  But the natives observe no sanitary laws, and the filth in which they live and move and have their being is simply appalling.