The whole difficulty of the caste question, as regards the Sacrament, lies in this, namely, that a high-caste vegetarian objects to drink wine at the same time and after a low-caste meat-eater.  And here I find a great difficulty in finding words or illustrations that will at all convey the feelings of a high-caste vegetarian at the very idea of drinking after a low-caste carrion-eater.  If from the lowest, filthiest, and most poisonous dens in London, you were to take a man, reeking with beer and tobacco, and with his clothes crawling with vermin, and presenting, in short, every appearance of foulness, dirt, and disease; if you were to take that man and place him between two ladies at the administration of the Holy Communion, I do not say that they would there and then refuse the Sacrament on these terms, but I think we may be pretty sure that, from sanitary motives, if from no others, they would in future take the Sacrament in a place where they would not be liable to such contact.  Their feelings and senses would be shocked by such contact as I have imagined, but their sensations would merely bear the same proportion to the sensations of a high-caste vegetarian Hindoo who had to drink after a Pariah that a trifling cause of disgust would bear to the most intolerable and lasting degradation.  Now, to people in this country, this may seem an extraordinary thing; but they will think it less extraordinary when I tell them that, if I could not take the Sacrament unless amongst Pariahs, I would never take it again, unless perhaps, I were to put myself bodily into one of Professor Tyndall’s cotton-gauze air-cleansers, and drink the sacramental wine after it had been boiled at a temperature of 212 degrees, and passed through a filter.  And when I talk of the lowest castes as carrion-eaters, I must tell the reader that I am not in the slightest degree guilty of exaggeration, and that they are carrion-eaters in exactly the same sense that vultures are carrion-eaters.  In fact, these men never get any meat unless that of animals that have died of disease; and as in these climates decomposition is extremely rapid, the reader can imagine the result of coming in contact with a man who has, perhaps, a few hours before been eating a mass of diseased and half decomposed meat.  And in case the reader should not be able to imagine what the result is, I may mention the following circumstance.  A few days after I had killed a bison I had occasion to point out some pieces of sawn wood which I wished to be removed from the jungle to my house, and I accordingly took with me a native overseer, and two coolies to carry the timber.  When I was pointing out the pieces to them, I smelt a strong smell of putrid meat, which seemed to fill the air so entirely that I at once concluded that a tiger must have killed some animal and left the carcase near the spot.  My overseer and myself looked about everywhere, but at last happening to pass the coolies, I at once perceived that the smell arose from their breath, and on questioning