attendants, each of whom has her own palace and three millions of private maids and waiting-women.  It appears that once upon a time two over-loving Gopis quarreled about the god, and, as might be expected in a place so given over to love, they fell from heaven as a consequence.  Animated by love for them, Krishna descended from heaven, incarnated himself in the form of Vallabha (founder of the sect), and finally redeemed them.  Vallabha’s descendants are therefore all gods, and reverence is paid them as such, the number of them being now sixty or seventy.  To God belong all things—­Tan (the body), Man (the mind) and Dhan (earthly possessions).  The Vallabhacharyas therefore give up all first to be enjoyed by their god, together with his descendants (the Maharajas, as they royally term themselves) and his representatives, the gosains or priestly teachers.  Apply these doctrines logically, and what a carnival of the senses results!  A few years ago one Karsandas Mulji, a man of talent and education, was sued for libel in the court at Bombay by this sect, whose practices he had been exposing.  On the trial the evidence revealed such a mass of iniquity, such a complete subversion of the natural proprietary feelings of manhood in the objects of its love, such systematic worship of beastly sin, as must for ever give the Vallabhacharyas pre-eminence among those who have manufactured authority for crime out of the laws of virtue.  For the Vallabhacharyas derive their scriptural sanction from the eighth book of the Bhagavata Purana, which they have completely falsified from its true meaning in their translation called the Prem Sagar, or “Ocean of Love.”  You saw the son?  In twenty years—­for these people cannot last long—­trade and cunning and the riot of all the senses will have made him what you saw the father.”

[Illustration:  THE JAMMAH MASJID AT DELHI.]

On the next day we visited the Jammah Masjid, the “Great Mosque” of Shah Jehan the renowned, and the glory of Delhi.  Ascending the flight of steps leading to the principal entrance, we passed under the lofty arch of the gateway and found ourselves in a great court four hundred and fifty feet square, paved with red stone, in the centre of which a large basin supplied by several fountains contained the water for ceremonial ablutions.  On three sides ran light and graceful arcades, while the fourth was quite enclosed by the mass of the mosque proper.  Crossing the court and ascending another magnificent flight of stone steps, our eyes were soon commanding the facade of the great structure, and reveling in those prodigious contrasts of forms and colors which it presents.  No building could, for this very reason, suffer more from that lack of simultaneity which is involved in any description by words; for it is the vivid shock of seeing, in one stroke of the eye, these three ripe and luxuriant domes (each of which at the same time offers its own subsidiary opposition of white and black stripes), relieved by the keen heights of the two flanking minarets,—­it is this, together with the noble admixtures of reds, whites and blacks in the stones, crowned by the shining of the gilded minaret-shafts, which fills the eye of the beholder with a large content of beautiful form and color.