with indifference, and even with dislike, the characteristic products of his own country.

One enters some Maharaja's palace by an archway of exquisitely-carved stone or of inlaid. marble, with gates of beaten silver which Ghiberti would have admired, and between guards with damascened armour and Toledo blades, to find oneself in a drawing-room choked with all the horrors of Tottenham Court Road-glass chandeliers, glass curtain-rods with crimson plush curtains, crimson plush upholstery on the glass chairs, glass tables in double and triple tiers, glass punkah-rods even, which must have been a special order, a deliberate infamy, and fringes of tinkling glass prisms along every edge and cornice where they may be hung. The carpet is a painful Brussels; there are cheap German oleographs on the walls, papered with glistening cornucopia of roses, and the rest is all gilding and mirrors and Italian statuettes. That is the top, and the bottom is even more preposterous— the bottom is the Standard Oil Company's square tin cans on the heads of the women, where once were only the lovely chattis of brown earthenware or hammered brass.

Maharajas' palaces, at palaces, at least the inside of them, may be avoided, but there is no escape from the desecration of the well and of the village and of the women themselves, by these horrible husks of commerce. In all India there

is nothing which SO constantly destroys the beauties of its scenes as these tin pests; there is no place secure from them to which water may be carried, and the range of their adoption will give some idea of the difficulties ahead of the Swadeshi movement, and the sacrifices it must require even from the poor. Also, to meet the prevalent demand for Western ugliness and cheapness, the small native trader has filled his store and the small shopkeeper his shelves with all the trash the West could offer him, and for both of these some sort of compensation has to be provided. Hence there are many embarrassments to be dealt with, and progress must for some time be slow, but, even if final success do not attend the movement, India will have proved herself capable of carrying an effort of pure patriotism much further than it could ever have been advanced at home; and one cannot but believe that in England there must be many who have neither seen India nor, perhaps, will ever see it, who yet will find themselves in sympathy with an effort to preserve its heritage of beauty, to train its people to an appreciation of that inheritance, and to revive those innocent industries which neither defile the air, pollute the water, nor make prisoners of men's bodies and souls.

CHAPTER XV

THE CITY OF RICE

seems like a And with it,

CALCUTTA is far astern, Rangoon two hundred miles across the blue water of the Bay, and the red full moon is rising out of China almost ahead of us. The damp sultry air is growing cooler, as though a lump of ice had been dropped into it, and on the coolness comes a faint illusion of blossoms, the mere shadow of a scent, which on shore would pass undiscernible, but out in the empty odourless air of the sea breath from the Isle of Spices. proof to the undiscerning, the blue water to the northward is changing colour to a dull brownish gray, which looks strangely in the moon-tinted twilight like a wall of vapour, for we are past Pagoda Point, and north by east of us a land lies, split and scored and swamped with waterways, out of which gushes, as through some tightened throat, the teeming moisture from two hundred thousand square miles of country. Small wonder that the sea is stained with silt far out of sight of shore, or that the soft monsoon comes laden with aromatic odours which have floated down by river from Tibet and Cathay.