"Ah, how my countryman Bergh would luxuriate in this scene!" I said as
we stood looking upon the various dumb exhibitions of so many phases
of sickness, of decrepitude and of mishap--quaint, grotesque, yet
pathetic withal--in the precincts of the Jain hospital. Here were
quadrupeds and bipeds, feathered creatures and hairy creatures, large
animals and small, shy and tame, friendly and predatory--horses,
horned cattle, rats, cats, dogs, jackals, crows, chickens; what not.
An attendant was tenderly bandaging the blinking lids of a sore-eyed
duck: another was feeding a blind crow, who, it must be confessed,
looked here very much like some fat member of the New York Ring
cunningly availing himself of the more toothsome rations in the sick
ward of the penitentiary. My friend pointed out to me a heron with a
wooden leg. "Suppose a gnat should break his shoulder-blade," I said,
"would they put his wing in a sling?"

[Illustrations: INTERIOR OF THE GREAT SHAÎTYA OF KARLI.]

Bhima Gandharva looked me full in the face, and, smiling gently, said,
"They would if they could."

The Jains are considered to have been the architects _par excellence_
of India, and there are many monuments, in all styles, of their skill
in this kind. The strange statues of the Tirthankars in the gorge
called the Ourwhaï of Gwalior were (until injured by the "march of
improvement") among the most notable of the forms of rock-cutting.
These vary in size from statuettes of a foot in height to colossal
figures of sixty feet, and nothing can be more striking than these
great forms, hewn from the solid rock, represented entirely nude,
with their impassive countenances, which remind every traveler of
the Sphinx, their grotesque ears hanging down to their shoulders, and