India is unique. It differs from all other lands in situation, climate, history, and religion. Its form is that of a gigantic triangle, one thousand nine hundred miles in length, and in its broadest part as wide as from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. Yet this enormous section of our earth is a peninsula. If we compare the continent of Asia to a ship, the sharp-pointed wedge of India is its prow, cleaving the Indian Ocean almost to the equator and rolling one great mass of water eastward to be silvered by the dawn, and a still larger volume westward to be gilded by the setting sun. The northern side of this vast triangle is rightly called "The Roof of the World." It is a vast mountain range so high that if the Pyrenees were piled upon the Alps, it would still tower above them both by four thousand feet. Yet just below these citadels of snow, upon the Indian plains, the heat at times exceeds that of almost any other place on earth. In parts of India, for example, during the prevalence of the hot winds, the mercury rises to 1200 in the shade, and certain forms of vegetation wither and turn black, as from the effects of fire. At such times, in the homes of Europeans, all doors and windows facing windward are covered with thick mats, which are kept wet by buckets of water thrown on them day and night by native servants. The wind, which is like a blast from a furnace, becomes thus somewhat more endurable by passing through the moistened matting. But under any circumstances foreigners in India suffer greatly during the summer months, unless they can escape to the mountains. In summer the railway authorities actually keep coffins ready at the principal stations to receive the bodies of travelers who may have succumbed to the heat, victims of a climate suited to another race. India is, therefore, a land of startling contrasts. While prostrated by the heat upon the plains, one maybe gazing on eternal snow. It is a kind of meeting, in one land, of the North Pole and the Equator.

An Indian Postman.

The Beach At Colombo.

But India's history is as wonderful as her geography. She is degraded now, but nothing can efface the memory of her splendid past. She is the cradle of the two most wide-spread religions of humanity, Hinduism and Buddhism - the first of which can boast of thirty centuries of existence, while into a magnificent literature whose epic poems are the Bible of the Orient.

Like Italy, however, India had the "fatal gift of beauty." For ages men have looked on her with longing eyes. From Alexander the Great to the Great Moguls, and even to Great Britain, this land of wealth has been the object of the world's cupidity. At first it was too distant to be easily reached, save by some Asiatic conqueror; but by a singular coincidence both India and America were discovered at practically the same time. For, only six years after Columbus landed on San Salvador, Vasco da Gama found the passage around the southern point of Africa, and while America lured adventurous mariners to her distant shores, in India European conquerors swung open to the commerce of the world the jeweled portals of the Orient. It is, then, this historic land, which wears the radiant Himalayas for a diadem and claims the Sanskrit-speaking heroes for her earlier inhabitants, that is the theme of this lecture.

It was late in the afternoon when, on our voyage from China across the Indian Ocean, we approached Ceylon.

The pilot, who climbed from his little boat to the deck of our huge steamer, was the first human being we had met since leaving Singapore. All was excitement. An irresistible desire prevailed among the passengers to quote Bishop Heber's familiar lines -

" What though the spicy breezes Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle; Though every prospect pleases, And only man is vile."

Two different groups were singing this at once; and every other person whom I met would say to me, "Well, I suppose that to-morrow we shall be where 'every prospect pleases.'" One solemn spinster gravely remarked that, for her part, she expected to find the Ceylon men no worse than those of other lands. At last the following notice was posted in the companion-way: "All allusions to spicy breezes and the depravity of man are strictly prohibited."