apt to waste much money on sentiment. They did not come to India to leave money behind, but to take it away, and all the money spent here is first to secure the government of the country, and next to ameliorate the condition of the people and prevent famines. The money which England takes out of India every year is a serious drain upon the country, and is among the causes of its poverty. But if money is to be spent, it is better to do so upon works of irrigation that will prevent famines than upon monuments, which mean nothing to this generation, and which might all be destroyed with a few exceptions without any loss to history or art.

And yet it is sad to ride over these dusty roads and see around you the abounding evidences of an ancient and imperial civilization of which only the stones remain. Ruins-miles and miles of ruins on which the vultures perch. I am thinking of a ride from the Kutab to Humayun's tomb, two of the noted spots in the Delhi suburbs, and which I think was as melancholy, so far as the desolation was concerned, as any I ever saw. In Egypt the ruin is finished and you see only the sand. In the Holy Land there are the promises of an era when the temples shall rise again in honor of the Lord, and the land will flow with milk and honey. In India you see the marks of the spoiler, the grandeur that was once paramount, and you see how hopeless and irreparable is the destruction. You contrast the fertility of nature with the poverty of man, never so marked in contrast as here, where the genius of man has done so much, and where the humblest flower that blooms in the fields has a life beyond it all. You rode through a city of ruins, which once was a capital of 2,000,000, and now has scarcely 250,000. You pass earthworks centuries old, which show the lines of the early struggles between Hindoo and Moslem. You see, as you study the ruins, that most of the work, even the most attractive, was in its day merely veneering, and somehow the suggestion comes that this Mogul reign, the evidences of whose splendor surround you, was in itself a veneering-that it had no place in India, was merely an outside coating which could not stand the wear and tear of time. Men pass you with hooded falcons on

THE TOMB OF HUMAYUN.

57

their arms and ask you to buy them. to buy them. A covered carriage passes and you know that the inclosure is sacred to the presence of a Hindoo lady of high caste, who is always in seclusion. The bullock cart trudges slowly along. The burden bearers pass, carrying grass or twigs, carrying burdens on their thin, lithe limbs that would shame our stalwart sons. You see men at a well pumping water in Egyptian fashion for irrigation, for domestic uses, and women carrying water on their heads in stone jars.

Beggars are everywhere, for in India begging is a perennial growth. Monkeys climb on the walls, and stare and chatter and go scampering through the trees. The skies are gray, which is rare in India, and a cold wind comes over the plain. We have so much of the sunshine that we can glory in the mist. This tomb of Humayun, for instance, is one of the ruins that even a thrifty government with pensions to pay and an army to support should protect. It is not a beautiful work like the Taj, nor a stupendous work like Futtehpoor Sikra, and the prince for whom it was built was scarcely worth remembering. It differs from the Taj, among other things, in this—that while one was a monument of the love of a husband, this is the monument of the love of a wife. It is believed that the Taj was inspired by Humayun's tomb, as the design is the same in many essentials, and the one preceded the other by a century. To have inspired the Taj is honor enough for any mausoleum, but the vastness of Humayun's tomb grows on you. You walk into a walled inclosure and over a wide courtyard, and ascend steps to a platform, from which you have a good view of Delhi in the distance and the suburbs. You enter the building, which is a series of high chambers, separated by marble walls, latticed and worked into screens. Here are eighteen tombs-modest blocks of marble, most of them without any name or design. It is known that Humayun rests here, and with him five of his royal descendants, and eleven others who were friends and councilors of kings and thought worthy of a royal tomb. But only one tomb has really been identified-the tomb of Dara, the unhappy son of Shah Ishan, brother of Aurungzebe, and

treated by his brother as James II. treated Monmouth. The romance of his life ended in tragedy, and all that remains of it is the slender tomb in the mausoleum of his ancestor.

Humayun's tomb, however, has a memory even more tragic in the history of the house of Tamerlane than that of Prince Dara. It was here that the dynasty came to an ignoble and a tragic end. When the English army stormed Delhi in 1857, plundering the town and putting the garrison and many of the inhabitants to the sword, the king with his wives and sons escaped, and took refuge in Humayun's tomb. The poor, old, foolish monarch, who had been hustled on the throne by the bayonets of the mutinous Sepoys, went by some instinct for refuge to the tombs of his ancestors. Here he was found by the English under Captain Hodson. Hodson. You can understand the amount of valor that remained in the Delhi imperial family when you know that Hodson made the capture with a force of fifty native cavalry. The inclosure was filled with Moslem refugees, three thousand, at least, the princes among them. Not a blow was struck. The old king came out, and, with trembling hand, gave his sword to Hodson, who told him he would kill him like a dog if any attempt was made at his rescue. This achievement, a single white man with fifty native troops carrying off an emperor from the mausoleum of his fathers, defended by thousands of his followers, should be ranked among the greatest deeds of military daring. It shows also the weakness, the cowardice, the despair of the imperial retinue. Behind works they had fought with valor. Defeated, they collapsed. The king was carried to the city and imprisoned in his own palace. The next day Hodson, with a hundred natives, an informer named Rujjab Ali, who had sold his honor for his life, and a young officer named Lieutenant Macdurall, came to the tomb. Inside of the inclosure were 3,000 Mussulmans, all armed; outside, 3,000 more. Hodson demanded the unconditional surrender of the princes. The armed men asked to be led against the English officers and their hundred men. But the princes, hoping against hope, supposing that the father having been spared there would be an extension of mercy, would

not strike a blow. They came out in time in a small bullock cart, followed by two or three thousand Mussulmans. Hodson then entered the tomb, ascended the steps, and called on the mob to lay down their arms. The command was obeyed, and for two hours the two Englishmen and the hundred natives remained collecting the arms of men whose profession was war.

The crowd having been disarmed and the arms piled in carts, Hodson rode on and joined his command, who were taking the princes in the bullock cart into Delhi. They were

then within a mile of the town, followed by the Mussulmans. Hodson imagined that there would be a rescue-really believed that men who, with arms in their hands, would see their king surrender without a blow, and who would lay down their arms. at the command of two English officers, had spirit enough left to attempt the rescue. Accordingly he halted his men, put a guard of five horsemen across the road, ordered the princes to descend and strip and then mount the cart. He made a short address to his men, saying who these men were, and why they should die. Having done so he shot them with his own hand,

"the Sikhs shouting with delight." The princes who were killed were the nephew of the king, the son, and another of high rank. Their bodies were taken into Delhi and for three days exposed on the ground. "The Sikhs said that on this very spot had been exposed the remains of Tegh Bahadur," the chief of their race, murdered by the Moguls, "nearly two hundred years before, to the insults of the Mohammedan crowd, and wondered at the fulfillment of their ancient prophecy." One of the ways of governing India, you will observe, is to arouse the passions and hatred of barbarians in past generations and to make one race do the work of blood upon the other.

In wandering about Delhi your mind is attracted to these sad scenes. What it must have been when the Moguls reigned you may see in the old palace, the great mosque of Shah Ishan, and the Kutab. On the afternoon of our arrival we were taken to the palace, which is now used as a fort for the defense of the city. We have an idea of what the palace must have been in the days of Aurungzebe. "Over against the great gate of the court," says a French writer who visited India in the seventeenth century, "there is a great and stately hall, with many ranks of pillars high raised, very airy, open on three sides, looking to the court, and having its pillars ground and gilded. In the midst of the wall which separateth this hall from the seraglio, there is an opening, or a kind of great window, high and large, and so high that a man cannot reach to it from below with his hand. There it is where the king appears, seated upon his throne, having his sons on his side, and some eunuchs standing, some of which drive away the flies with peacocks' tails, others fan him with great fans, others stand there ready with great respect and humility for several services. Thence he seeth beneath him all the umrahs, rajahs, and ambassadors, who are also all of them standing upon a raised ground encompassed with silver rails, with their eyes downward and their hands crossing their stomachs." "In the court he seeth a great crowd of all sorts of people." Sometimes his majesty would be entertained by elephants and fighting animals and reviews