* * * * *

Mrs. Carshore it would seem is partly right and partly wrong.  She is right in calling the Beara a Moslem Festival.  It is so; but we have the testimony of Horace Hayman Wilson to the fact that Hindu maids and matrons also launch their lamps upon the river.  My Hindu friend acknowledges that his countrymen in the North West Provinces have borrowed many of their customs from the Mahomedans, and though he is not aware of it, it may yet be the case, that some of the Hindus of Bengal, as elsewhere, have done the same, and that they set lamps afloat upon the stream to discover by their continued burning or sudden extinction the fate of some absent friend or lover.  I find very few Natives who are able to give me any exact and positive information concerning their own national customs.  In their explanations of such matters they differ in the most extraordinary manner amongst themselves.  Two most respectable and intelligent Native gentlemen who were proposing to lay out their grounds under my directions, told me that I must not cut down a single cocoa-nut tree, as it would be dreadful sacrilege—­equal to cutting the throats of seven brahmins!  Another equally respectable and intelligent Native friend, when I mentioned the fact, threw himself back in his chair to give vent to a hearty laugh.  When he had recovered himself a little from this risible convulsion he observed that his father and his grandfather had cut down cocoa-nut trees in considerable numbers without the slightest remorse or fear.  And yet again, I afterwards heard that one of the richest Hindu families in Calcutta, rather than suffer so sacred an object to be injured, piously submit to a very serious inconvenience occasioned by a cocoa-nut tree standing in the centre of the carriage road that leads to the portico of their large town palace.  I am told that there are other sacred trees which must not be removed by the hands of Hindus of inferior caste, though in this case there is a way of getting over the difficulty, for it is allowable or even meritorious to make presents of these trees to Brahmins, who cut them down for their own fire-wood.  But the cocoa-nut tree is said to be too sacred even for the axe of a Brahmin.

I have been running away again from my subject;—­I was discoursing upon May-day in England.  The season there is still a lovely and a merry one, though the most picturesque and romantic of its ancient observances, now live but in the memory of the “oldest inhabitants,” or on the page of history.[055]

    See where, amidst the sun and showers,
    The Lady of the vernal hours,
    Sweet May, comes forth again with all her flowers.

Barry Cornwall.