under the fierce heat in the middle of the road without appearing any the worse for it, although foreign doctors insist that this exposure is one of the chief causes of the enormous infant mortality in India.  This may be true, because a few days after birth babies are strapped upon the back of some younger child or are carried about the streets astride the hips of their mothers, brothers or sisters without any protection from the sun.

[Illustration:  A Hindu barber]

All outdoors is an Indian barber-shop.  The barbers have no regular places of business, but wander from house to house seeking and serving customers, or squat down on the roadside and intercept them as they pass.  In the large cities you can see dozens of them squatting along the streets performing their sacred offices, shaving the heads and oiling the bodies of customers.  Cocoanut oil is chiefly used and is supposed to add strength and suppleness to the body.  It is administered with massage, thoroughly rubbed in and certainly cannot injure anybody.  In the principal parks of Indian cities, at almost any time in the morning, you can see a dozen or twenty men being oiled and rubbed down by barbers or by friends, and a great deal of oil is used in the hair.  After a man is grown he allows his hair to grow long and wears it in a knot at the back of his head.  Some Hindus have an abundance of hair, of which they are very proud, and upon which they spend considerable care and labor.

The parks are not only used for dressing-rooms, but for bedrooms also.  Thousands of people sleep in the open air day and night, stretched full length upon the ground.  They wrap their robes around their heads and leave their legs and feet uncovered.  This is the custom of the Indians of the Andes.  No matter how cold or how hot it may be they invariably wrap the head and face up carefully before sleeping and leave the lower limbs exposed.  A Hindu does not care where he sleeps.  Night and day are the same to him.  He will lie down on the sidewalk in the blazing sunshine anywhere, pull his robe up over his head and sleep the sleep of the just.  You can seldom walk a block without seeing one of these human bundles all wrapped up in white cotton lying on the bare stone or earth in the most casual way, but they are very seldom disturbed.

You have to get up early in the morning to see the most interesting sights in Benares, which are the pilgrims engaged in washing their sins away in the sacred but filthy waters of the Ganges, and the outdoor cremation of the bodies of people who have died during the night and late in the afternoon of the preceding day.  Hindus allow very little time between death and cremation.  As soon as the heart ceases to beat the undertakers, as we would call the men who attend to these arrangements, are sent for and preparation for the funeral pyre is commenced immediately.  Three or four hours only are necessary, and if death occurs later than 1 or 2 o’clock in the afternoon the ceremony must be postponed until morning.  Hence all of the burning ghats along the river bank are busy from daylight until mid-day disposing of the bodies of those who have died during the previous eighteen or twenty hours.