them, I found that before coming to work they had been feasting on decayed bison flesh.  In fact, after killing a bison, we could never go near our coolies for some days afterwards.  But to see a party of these men sitting like vultures around the carcase of some animal that has just died of some abominable disease is quite enough to inspire even an unprejudiced European meat-eater-with the most wholesome horror; and the reader need not, I think, be surprised at the feelings of disgust which these men’s habits inspire amongst the respectable classes of the community.  But independently of all feelings of disgust, there are sanitary considerations which are of infinitely more importance, for it so happens that, at a time when the weather is hottest and the season most unhealthy, a larger number of animals die; and I have very little doubt that this eating of rotten meat causes amongst the Pariahs a large quantity of disease, and especially of cholera, which they would not fail to disseminate with fatal certainty amongst all classes, were the native Christians compelled to take the Sacrament indiscriminately.  And, in my own experience, I have observed that cholera has passed through districts, that the upper classes have been free from it, but that amongst the lower the victims were many.  And the same sanitary reasons that apply to the Sacrament apply equally well to the mixing of castes indiscriminately in the churches; for it might so happen, as it frequently does, that fever and cholera may be prevalent amongst the lower castes, while the higher may be at that time comparatively free from such diseases.  So that, when we take all these points into consideration, we shall find that the German missionaries were perfectly right in placing the men of the higher caste on one side of the church, and those of the lower on the other, and that they were equally right in allowing the higher castes to approach the Sacrament at a different time from the lower.  I may here remark that I once mentioned this taking of the Sacrament in a sort of order of precedence to a clergyman in a country parish, when he told me that exactly the same sort of thing occurred in his parish, and that the lord of the manor invariably took the Sacrament first, and, if I recollect rightly, the parish clerk last; and a special instance of this in a Scotch parish was mentioned to me not long ago.

The same sanitary considerations will also naturally be of value when we come to consider that indiscriminate social intercourse which the missionaries so much insist upon as one of the necessary signs of grace.  I do not, of course, say that it is not advisable, and that it would not be desirable to see a little more intercourse between class and class than exists at the present.  But between all the better classes there is a much greater degree of intercourse than our missionaries would have us believe; and it is not true that one caste will eat only the food prepared by a person of his own caste.  I cannot, of course,