ABSTRACT
Crossing the river by steamboat one early morning, we made our first acquaintance with an Indian railway-station thronged with natives, some starting on pilgrimage, others on divers business. For the facilities of modern travel have developed a curiously locomotive tendency in the Hindoo. Their old proverb that “No one is so happy as he who never owed a debt, nor undertook a journey” is quite out of date, and now whole families start from one end of the country to the other, on the smallest pretext, carrying with them their poor stock of worldly goods, tied up in a little bundle, to which are added their cooking pots, and brazen drinking-cups, as no man could ever borrow the use of such articles from a neighbour, for fear of ceremonial defilement.
