_February_ 1891.
The post office is in a part of our estate office building,--this is very
convenient, for we get our letters as soon as they arrive. Some evenings
the postmaster comes up to have a chat with me. I enjoy listening to his
yarns.
He talks of the most impossible things in the gravest possible manner.
Yesterday he was telling me in what great reverence people of this
locality hold the sacred river Ganges. If one of their relatives dies, he
said, and they have not the means of taking the ashes to the Ganges, they
powder a piece of bone from his funeral pyre and keep it till they come
across some one who, some time or other, has drunk of the Ganges. To him
they administer some of this powder, hidden in the usual offering of
_pán_[1], and thus are content to imagine that a portion of the
remains of their deceased relative has gained purifying contact with the
sacred water.
[Footnote 1: Spices wrapped in betel leaf.]