embracing his corpse, they are there consumed in the same fire.  This they do voluntarily, and without compulsion, their parents, relations, and friends joyfully accompanying them; and, when the pile of this hellish sacrifice begins to burn, all the assembled multitude shout and make a noise, that the screams of the tortured living victims may not be heard.  This abominable custom is not very much unlike the custom of the Ammonites, who made their children pass through the fire to Moloch, during which they caused certain tabrets or drums to sound, whence the place was called Tophet, signifying a tabret.  There is one sect among the Hindoos, called Parsees, who neither burn nor inter their dead.  They surround certain pieces of ground with high walls, remote from houses or public roads, and there deposit their dead, wrapped in sheets, which thus have no other tombs but the maws of ravenous fowls.[240]

[Footnote 240:  These Parsees, called Parcees in the Pilgrims, and Guebres by other writers, are a remnant of the ancient Persians, who are fire-worshippers, or followers of Zerdust, the Zoroaster of the Greeks.—­E.]

The Hindoos are, generally speaking, an industrious race; being either cultivators of the ground, or otherwise diligently employed in various occupations.  Among them there are many curious artificers, who are the best imitators in the world, as they will make any thing new very exactly after a pattern.  The Mahometans, on the contrary, are generally idle, being all for to morrow, a common saying among them, and live by the labours of the Hindoos.  Some of these poor deluded idolaters will eat of nothing which has had life, feeding on grain, herbs, milk, butter, cheese, and sweet-meats, of which last they have various kinds, the best and most wholesome of which is green ginger remarkably well preserved.  Some tribes eat fish, and of no other living thing.  The Rajaput tribe eat swine’s flesh, which is held in abomination by the Mahometans.  Some will eat of one kind of flesh, and some of another; but all the Hindoos universally abstain from beef owing to the reverence they entertain for cows; and therefore give large sums yearly to the Mogul, besides his other exactions, as a ransom for the lives of these sacred animals.  Whence, though they have other and good provisions in abundance, we meet with very little meat in that country.

The most tender-hearted among the idolaters are called Banians, who hold the metempsychosis of Pythagoras as a prime article of their faith, believing that the souls of the best men and women, when freed from the prison of their human bodies, transmigrate into the bodies of cows, which they consider as the best of all creatures.  They hold that the souls of the wicked go into the bodies of viler beasts; as the souls of gluttons into swine, those of the voluptuous and incontinent into apes and monkies; the souls of the cruel, furious, and revengeful, into lions, tigers,