during religious festivals, especially if they happen to be held by both communities at the same time.  The chief stone of offence for Hindus is the sacrifice of cows, the most sacred to them of all animals, without which the Mahomedans consider their great annual festival of Bakar-Id cannot be complete.  Mahomedans, on the other hand, to whom musical instruments as an accompaniment to religious worship are abhorrent, are often driven wild when Hindu processions pass with their bands playing in front of a mosque.  Only four years ago, when the compact between the National Congress and the Moslem League was still quite fresh, riots broke out simultaneously during the Bakar-Id over a great part of the Patna district, which were only suppressed after a large tract of some forty miles square had passed into the hands of the Hindu mobs, when a considerable military force reached the scenes of turmoil and disorder, for the like of which, according to the Government Resolution, it was necessary to go back over a period of sixty years to the days of the great Mutiny.  It would be of little purpose to enumerate many other instances of disorders on a lesser scale that have occurred since then in connection with cow-killing.  When staying for a few days last winter in Nellore, a small town in the Madras Presidency, i.e. in a part of India noted for its quietude, I had a pertinent illustration of the often trivial but none the less dangerous forms that the persistent animosity between Hindus and Mahomedans can assume.  In Nellore, itself a very sleepy hollow, the Mahomedans are not quite in such a hopelessly small minority as they generally are in Southern India, for they number about 6000 out of 30,000 inhabitants.  The few “Non-co-operationists” in the place, Hindu and Mahomedan, professed to have formed a “Reconciliation Committee” to prevent their co-religionists from flying at each other’s throats.  Their efforts were not, however, sufficient to relieve the local authorities from the necessity of putting some of the police on special service for the protection of respectable Hindu traders of the same caste as Mr. Gandhi himself in their daily comings and goings through certain quarters of the city against the more unruly of their Mahomedan fellow-citizens.  The usual bad feeling had been exacerbated by an affray, already the best part of a year old, when one of the Hindu processions from the four great temples of the city perversely altered its accustomed route and passed down the streets leading to the chief mosque with bands defiantly playing, and a party of Mahomedans lying in wait for them rushed out and assaulted them with brick-bats, until they were dispersed by a few rifle-shots from the police.  Apart from such major provocation, each side indulges in minor pin-pricks that keep up a constant irritation.  It is an old custom at both Hindu and Mahomedan festivals for youths to dress up as tigers and lions, who add an element of terror to the pageant by roaring to order.