the man had not changed his attitude a hair.  He will always remain with me, I suppose; his figure never grows vague in my memory.  Whenever I read of Indian resignation, Indian patience under wrongs, hardships, and misfortunes, he comes before me.  He becomes a personification, and stands for India in trouble.  And for untold ages India in trouble has been pursued with the very remark which I was going to utter but didn’t, because its meaning had slipped me:  “Jeddy jow!” ("Come, shove along!”)

Why, it was the very thing.

In the early brightness we made a long drive out to the Fort.  Part of the way was beautiful.  It led under stately trees and through groups of native houses and by the usual village well, where the picturesque gangs are always flocking to and fro and laughing and chattering; and this time brawny men were deluging their bronze bodies with the limpid water, and making a refreshing and enticing show of it; enticing, for the sun was already transacting business, firing India up for the day.  There was plenty of this early bathing going on, for it was getting toward breakfast time, and with an unpurified body the Hindoo must not eat.

Then we struck into the hot plain, and found the roads crowded with pilgrims of both sexes, for one of the great religious fairs of India was being held, just beyond the Fort, at the junction of the sacred rivers, the Ganges and the Jumna.  Three sacred rivers, I should have said, for there is a subterranean one.  Nobody has seen it, but that doesn’t signify.  The fact that it is there is enough.  These pilgrims had come from all over India; some of them had been months on the way, plodding patiently along in the heat and dust, worn, poor, hungry, but supported and sustained by an unwavering faith and belief; they were supremely happy and content, now; their full and sufficient reward was at hand; they were going to be cleansed from every vestige of sin and corruption by these holy waters which make utterly pure whatsoever thing they touch, even the dead and rotten.  It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining.  It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is.  No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites.  There are choice great natures among us that could exhibit the equivalent of this prodigious self-sacrifice, but the rest of us know that we should not be equal to anything approaching it.  Still, we all talk self-sacrifice, and this makes me hope that we are large enough to honor it in the Hindoo.