Then there came a great day when this illusion was more pronounced than ever.  A rich Hindoo had been spending a fortune upon the manufacture of a crowd of idols and accompanying paraphernalia whose purpose was to illustrate scenes in the life of his especial god or saint, and this fine show was to be brought through the town in processional state at ten in the morning.  As we passed through the great public pleasure garden on our way to the city we found it crowded with natives.  That was one sight.  Then there was another.  In the midst of the spacious lawns stands the palace which contains the museum—­a beautiful construction of stone which shows arched colonnades, one above another, and receding, terrace-fashion, toward the sky.  Every one of these terraces, all the way to the top one, was packed and jammed with natives.  One must try to imagine those solid masses of splendid color, one above another, up and up, against the blue sky, and the Indian sun turning them all to beds of fire and flame.

Later, when we reached the city, and glanced down the chief avenue, smouldering in its crushed-strawberry tint, those splendid effects were repeated; for every balcony, and every fanciful bird-cage of a snuggery countersunk in the house-fronts, and all the long lines of roofs were crowded with people, and each crowd was an explosion of brilliant color.

Then the wide street itself, away down and down and down into the distance, was alive with gorgeously-clothed people not still, but moving, swaying, drifting, eddying, a delirious display of all colors and all shades of color, delicate, lovely, pale, soft, strong, stunning, vivid, brilliant, a sort of storm of sweetpea blossoms passing on the wings of a hurricane; and presently, through this storm of color, came swaying and swinging the majestic elephants, clothed in their Sunday best of gaudinesses, and the long procession of fanciful trucks freighted with their groups of curious and costly images, and then the long rearguard of stately camels, with their picturesque riders.

For color, and picturesqueness, and novelty, and outlandishness, and sustained interest and fascination, it was the most satisfying show I had ever seen, and I suppose I shall not have the privilege of looking upon its like again.

CHAPTER LXI.

In the first place God made idiots.  This was for practice.  Then He made
School Boards. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

Suppose we applied no more ingenuity to the instruction of deaf and dumb and blind children than we sometimes apply in our American public schools to the instruction of children who are in possession of all their faculties?  The result would be that the deaf and dumb and blind would acquire nothing.  They would live and die as ignorant as bricks and stones.  The methods used in the asylums are rational.  The teacher