Pondicherry was threatened, and Lally found himself in Tanjore, where he had hoped to recover a considerable sum due to the Company; on his road he had attacked a pagoda, thinking he would find there a great deal of treasure, but the idols were hollow and of worthless material.

The ringing of bells, and the full attendance of priests and worshippers of an evening, show the purpose to which these houses are dedicated, and superstition is here exhibited in its most revolting aspect, for there is no illusion to cheat the fancyno beautiful sequestered pagoda, with its shadowing trees and flower-strewed courts, to excite poetical ideasall being coarse, vulgar, and contemptible.

Each has his diamond weight in a bag hung on one side of his girdle, and on the other a purse containing sometimes as much as five or six hundred pagodas.

He supposed he was the first European that had explored the mines of Golconda; but an Englishman of the name of Methold visited them as early as 1622, and found thirty thousand laborers working away for the rich Marcandar, who paid three hundred thousand pagodas annually to the king for the privilege of digging in a single mine.

At six o'clock we halt for half an hour at King-Tcheou, of which I only saw a few pagodas, and about ten o'clock there is a halt of three-quarters of an hour at Si-Ngan, of which I did not even see the outline.

Over the meadows spread the regular Chinese-pagodas of the equisetum, (horsetail or scouring-rush,) and the rich coarse vegetation of the veratrum, or American hellebore.

While we were viewing the pagoda, the whole population of the village had assembled round about us, and as they behaved with tolerable quietness, we determined on paying a visit to the village itself.