mute pleadings on the stranger.

“It is right,” he continued, “not only to have thoughts of this Being, but to express them by some outward acts. The inhabitants of the world you are about to see, call this, worship,—and they have adopted (a Satanic smile curled his lip as he spoke) very different modes; so different, that, in fact, there is but one point in which they all agree—that of making their religion a torment;—the religion of some prompting them to torture themselves, and the religion of some prompting them to torture others. Though, as I observed, they all agree in this important point, yet unhappily they differ so much about the mode, that there has been much disturbance about it in the world that thinks.”—“In the world that thinks!” repeated Immalee,  “Impossible! Surely they must know that a difference cannot be acceptable to Him who is One.”—“And have you then adopted no mode of expressing your thoughts of this Being, that is, of worshipping him?” said the stranger.—“I smile when the sun rises in its beauty, and I weep when I see the evening star rise,” said Immalee.—“And do you recoil at the inconsistencies of varied modes of worship, and yet you yourself employ smiles and tears in your address to the Deity?”—“I do,—for they are both the expressions of joy with me,” said the poor Indian; “the sun is as happy when he smiles through the rain-clouds, as when he burns in the mid-height of heaven, in the fierceness of his beauty; and I am happy whether I smile or I weep.”—“Those whom you are about to see,” said the stranger, offering her the telescope, “are as remote in their forms of worship as smiles from tears; but they are not, like you, equally happy in both.”  Immalee applied her eye to the telescope, and exclaimed in rapture at what she saw. “What do you see?” said the stranger. Immalee described what she saw with many imperfect expressions, which, perhaps, may be rendered more intelligible by the explanatory words of the stranger.

“You see,” said he, “the coast of India, the shores of the world near you.—There is the black pagoda of Juggernaut, that enormous building on which your eye is first fixed. Beside it stands a Turkish mosque—you may distinguish it by a figure like that of the half-moon. It is the will of him who rules that world, that its inhabitants should worship him by that sign(13). At a small distance you may see a low building with a trident on its summit—that is the temple of Maha-deva, one of the ancient goddesses of the country.”—“But the houses are nothing to me,” said Immalee, “shew me the living things that go there. The houses are not half so beautiful as the rocks on the shore, draperied all over with sea-weeds and 

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