BENARES, THE SACRED CITY. ENARES is a strange and most interesting city, and its picturesqueness is only equalled by the villanousness of its smells. It is a city of temples, of priests, of devotees,1 and of beggars. It has its workers too, for here are made the superb brocades which we have admired upon the persons of the great princes all over India. It is great in brass - work, too, and its workers in this metal surpass those of all other parts of India. It manufactures many other articles, and is great especially at toys. But this is secondary: it is essentially a holy city. The temples are many hundreds in number-indeed, I am told that they number over a thousand-but they are, with scarce an exception, small and insignificant. I was, indeed, perfectly astonished on arriving at what I was told was one of the principal temples-the golden temple-to find, after wandering through abominablysmelling lanes, a small edifice, the cupola of which is indeed gilded, but the interior of which was dirty, not more than thirty feet square, and without a single claim to architectural, or, indeed, any other loveliness whatever. Filth and evil smells were, in fact, its only remarkable points, and even my guide urged me not to enter; for, as he said, "Smells very bad outside, much worse inside." As far as I have seen, the golden temple is a fair sample of the temples of Benares, and were I stationed here for the rest of my life, I would not seek to push my researches beyond the half-dozen I have now visited. In spite of all this, Benares strikes one as being what it is a great religious city. Any one who visits Benares and worships at its shrines 4 will pass direct to heaven without passing through the various animal transformations to which the less fortunate are subject; and accordingly tens of thousands of pilgrims visit Benares at all times of the year, to secure these benefits. Numbers of native princes have palaces within its walls, and although they may live in far-off parts of India, they hope some day to come and die in Benares. But the glory of Benares is its ghauts, its landingplaces, and the lines of temples and palaces abutting upon them. No city in the world, at least as far as my experience goes, can at all vie with that three miles of river frontage. The best time to see it is at early morning. Then the tide of bathing and washing is at its height, and the wide stone ghauts are bright with colours. The scarlet and blue robes of the women, and the shawls which many of the men wore wrapped round them, had a charming effect, and lit up marvellously the grey of the stone, and gave colour to the white-robed figures which formed the main body of the moving crowd. The Ganges is not a clear stream yet, although, owing to the prohibition of the native custom of floating the dead down the river, it is a good deal purer than formerly. At the burning ghaut, however, dead bodies can still be seen lying in the water until their time for combustion arrives, and the living wash and bathe unconcerned within a yard of them. Of the burning ghaut I say nothing. Its horrors are unspeakable. 6 Along the whole line of the ghauts are temples and palaces, the latter infinitely superior in an architectural point of view to the former. Many of the palaces of the native princes are extremely fine, and this not from any excess of ornament, for indeed all are very simple, but from their extreme massiveness and the purity of their Arabian architecture. Some of the temples, consisting almost entirely of the highly ornate pyramidal tower,' are situated low down near the river, the larger structures upon the top of the bank, fifty or sixty feet above the river level. One of the most singular features of Benares is the extreme tameness of all living things in it, and even the scavenger dogs walk in the streets with a confidence and familiarity rare elsewhere. Sacred cows wander about leisurely, harmless and apparently friendless, but in reality befriended and fed by all. Formerly these cows could eat at will from any of the sacks or panniers of grain exposed at the shop fronts, but this privilege is now abolished. On the mosques hundreds of bright young paroquets were flitting about, as tame apparently as the pigeons with whom they consorted; while everywhere in the suburbs of the city, near the river, monkeys abound, and are as tame and fearless as dogs. The monkey temple is, indeed, next to the Seal Island near San Francisco, the most singular natural menagerie I ever saw. In and around it there must be many hundreds of monkeys. As a matter of course, when a visitor arrives at the temple, a man from a shop across the street brings over a large measure of a sort of grain, and a basketful of little cakes. The monkeys come swinging down from wall and roof, and hold out their hands for cakes. All appear to have no fear whatever of harm, but I imagine that, putting aside the effects of the wrath of the natives, a man who was foolish enough to injure one of them would scarcely get out with his life. In some trees just outside the temple they seem even more numerous than within its walls, leaping about among the branches, swinging themselves up and down the trunks, or scampering about on the ground, in the full enjoyment of life.-Abridged. 1 Devotees. These are men exclusively devoted to religious observances according to their heathen notions. Some of them think to please their gods by putting themselves to the most frightful tortures. 2 Brocade, silk stuff, with patterns 3 Architectural, relating to the instance, the ashes of a martyr that has been burnt. 5 Animal transformations. The Hindoos believe that the soul, on passing out of the human body, is liable to enter into the body of an animal. This belief is called "the transmigration of souls." 6 Combustion, burning. (Lat. ustus, burnt.) 7 Ornate pyramidal tower, a tower tapering to a point like a pyramid, and highly ornamented with carving, &c. THE BOAR HUNT. [Hunting the wild boar used to be a favourite pastime, in which the noblest in the land took part. In "Quentin Durward," one of Sir Walter Scott's novels, founded on the history of Louis XI. of France (A.D. 1461-83), occurs the following sketch.] EFORE Cardinal Balue could utter a word by way went forth at an uncontrollable gallop, soon leaving behind the King and Count de Dunois, who followed at a more regulated pace, enjoying the cardinal's distressed predicament. If any of our readers have chanced to be run away with in their time (as we ourselves have in ours), they will have a full sense at once of the pain, peril, and absurdity of the situation. Those four limbs of the quadruped, which, no way under the rider's control, nor sometimes under that of the creature they more properly belong to, fly at such a rate as if the hindmost meant to overtake the foremost; those clinging legs of the biped,' which we so often wish safely planted on the green sward, but which now only augment our distress by pressing the animal's sides; the hands, which have |