in others than they might ever have suffered. To give but one other
instance typical of many--I saw Faneuil Hall in Boston in the company of
a Bostonian some thirty years of age, whose office was within a few
yards of this historic and very interesting building, and whose business
is more intimately associated with culture than any other, but who had
never before crossed the threshold.

The Towers of Silence, which are situated in a very beautiful park, with
little temples among the trees and flowers, consist of five circular
buildings, a model of one of which is displayed to visitors. Inside the
tower is an iron grating on which the naked corpses are laid, and no
sooner are they there than the awaiting vultures descend and consume the
flesh. I saw these grisly birds sitting expectantly in rows on the
coping of the towers, and the sight was almost too gruesome. Such is
their voracity that the body is a skeleton in an hour or so. The Parsees
choose this method of dissolution because since they worship fire they
must not ask it to demean itself with the dead; and both earth and water
they hold also too sacred to use for burial. Hence this strange and--at
the first blush--repellant compromise. The sight of the cemetery that
awaits us in England is rarely cheering, but if to that cemetery were
attached a regiment of cruel and hideous birds of prey we should shudder
indeed. Whether the Parsees shudder I cannot say, but they give no sign
of it. They build their palaces in full view of these terrible Towers,
pass, on their way to dinner parties, luxuriously in Rolls-Royces beside
the trees where the vultures roost, and generally behave themselves as
if this were the best possible of worlds and the only one. And I think
they are wise.

Oriental apathy, or, at any rate, unruffled receptiveness, may carry its
owner very far, and yet if these vultures cause no misgivings, no chills