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was to sit in patience until the chorus ended. I never saw any trader swear on the rupee. I am told that there is some spell attached to the oath on the rupee; that a false oath would be perjury, and the native avoids the vow. All you can do is to sit and look on. You may jog your servant, and tell him you are in a hurry, and ask him to bring the negotiation to a close; you may even express a desire, if time is an object, to pay all that is asked. It makes no difference. You are in the waves of the negotiation and they bear you sluggishly on and on. The laws of the trade cannot be broken. There is so much comfort in the whole business-to your Hindoo interpreter, who is at home in his bazaar; to the merchant, who has his hook in your gills and is simply testing your pulling power, and also the crowd around-that you in time become a spectator yourself, and enter into the amusement of the transaction and watch it as a curious phase of Indian manners. As a matter of observation the merchant seems to really ask about thirty per cent. more than he will take eventually. I have seen a good many abatements in the course of those small trades, but rarely more than thirty per cent.

Mr. Borie's well-ordered mercantile mind was so disturbed by these violations of sound business maxims in his purchases of bangles, garnets, jewels, cloths, laces, and shawls that it was with a sense of relief he discovered one honest merchant, who lived on the main street, and who bid us welcome to his bazaar with the assurance that he always charged one price, and had sold rampose chuddahs to Lord Lytton and the Prince of Wales. The honest merchant whom Mr. Borie discovered lived in a second story, up a narrow pair of stone steps, which you had to reach through a courtyard. Signals of our coming had been sent, for we found the establishment in a fluttering state, Hindoos in various stages of delight meeting us as we came. The proprietor was a smoothfaced Brahmin, in a blue, flowing robe, with a bland, smiling face, who spoke English enough for us not to understand him. By dint of pantomime, and now and then a noun asserting itself, and the aid of one or two clerks who knew English, we man

VISIT TO HINDOO BAZAAR.

9

aged to open negotiations. The merchant sat on a cushion on the floor, not resigned to fate, in Moslem fashion, leaving all things in the hands of Providence, knowing that what would be would be, and that it was not for mere men to try and change the decrees of Allah, but was eager, receptive, and conversed generally upon his honesty. Taking from his breast a packet. of papers, we found them letters from various exalted people commending his merchandise. Some were from Americans

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Mr. Cadwalader, Mr. Seward, and others. Then he told us he was a very good man and had saved money-some lacs of rupees. All this while servants were bringing in stuffs and throwing them around the floor. Other servants brought in trays laden with sweetmeats, among which I recall a candied mango, which was pleasant and new. Then champagne came in, and we began to feel as if we were at a fancy ball or some public entertainment, and not an afternoon visit to a shop. Mr. Borie commended the merchant for the sound business principles he had enunciated, which, he continued, were the funda

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mental elements of all success in business, and without which there could be no real prosperity. Looking over the various treasures strewn around, he intimated a fear that he might not be able to buy them. Then the merchant, with captivating tact, offered to sell Mr. Borie all the goods he wanted on credit, and if our friend was in need of money he would give him ten or twenty thousand rupees until he reached Calcutta or New York. To these courtesies and assurances Mr. Borie listened with beaming eyes, rejoiced to see sound business principles in India, and to know that his name was one which even in the farthest East was a spell to conjure up rupees.

Then the merchant told us of his family life, his wife and his children, sitting on his cushion all the time and looking at us with his smooth, bland, smiling face. I said that I had heard that a rampose chuddah was so soft that you could draw it through a ring, and expressed a desire to see the experiment. "Oh, yes," he said; "there are some that could be drawn through a ring." Mr. Borie was about to take a ring from his finger, but the merchant had one brought a large ring, I observed, that might have held the signet of Goliath. A shawl was brought and the operation began. First the merchant tried, twisted and untwisted, pulled and pulled. Then assistants tried, pulling and twisting until the perspiration came in beads, the merchant saying all the time that one of the advantages of the rampose chuddah was that you could pull it through a ring. In about a half hour the shawl came through, leaving the whole party in a panting condition, as though they had been running with a fire-engine. At intervals some curious bit of work would turn up, and attract Mr. Borie's attention, and be thrown on a pile. In this way business was done autobiography, sleight-of-hand, sweetmeats, champagne, and cigarettes. Then, when the conversation lulled, our merchant would tell us how honest he was, and never sold but at one price, in which resolution Mr. Borie confirmed him, from the results of his own ample and notable experience. Now and then, if a suggestion was made that something was too dear, the merchant would fold his hands and bow, and say he would

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have other articles opened of lesser value, but he had only one price. So our afternoon passed away, and when we returned home Mr. Borie expressed himself pleased with his day's visit, that it was really one of the most satisfactory days he had known in India, and that no one but a merchant could know the comfort it was to buy and sell at fixed prices. It did not change Mr. Borie's opinions in the least, but gave him a more extended view of the Indian character when he learned, a few days later, that there was no merchant in India more disposed to dicker than this tradesman, and that if he had bought his goods on Indian principles the afternoon would have passed just as pleasantly, and they would have cost him at least twenty per cent. less than was paid for them.

Agra contains only one monument, and the remains of a beautiful palace now used as a fort. When the descendants of the great house of Tamerlane overran India, Agra was among the cities which they captured. It was in the seventeenth century one of the wealthy cities of India, a rendezvous for Indian and Persian merchants. Akbar, who reigned in the sixteenth century, and was among the greatest of the Moguls, gave Agra its grandeur. He built his palace, which is now the fort. What it must have been in the time of the emperor we may imagine from what we see at Jeypore, where the Maharajah still reigns and lives in Oriental splendor. No modern palace can give you an idea of what these royal residences must have been in their day. Royal life now is not what it was under the great kings. A Mogul kept about him thousands of retainers. A palace was a fort, a barracks, a home for the sovereign, his harem, his ministers, and his nobility. You can understand, then, why the palace of Akbar should have occupied a site of nearly four square miles. miles. But the mere size of the Agra palace will give you no conception of its splendor. Many changes have taken place since Akbar's time The mutiny led the English to sweep away certain sections for strategic reasons. As a monument of Moslem architecture the palace is one of the best specimens, and reminds you of the Alhambra, although in a better condition, and with marks of a barbaric splendor which do not

belong to the Alhambra, and which are the effect of Indian taste blended with Saracenic art. It was in this palace that the families of the British residents took refuge during the mutiny of 1857.

A description of the palace, to give you any idea of its vastness and splendor, would be impossible in the space of any publication not devoted to architecture. The palace is built of red sandstone, a stone that seems to have been the foundation of all the buildings of the Akbar domination. The same stone prevails at Futtipoor-Sikra. But all the ornamentation, the chambers, corridors, and pa

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vilions, are of

CARRIAGE OF HINDOO LADY.

white marble. The influence of a European taste is seen in the mosaic, which repeats the Florentine school, and is even carried out in the bazaars, where Agra mosaic

that looks like a crude imitation of Florence is a specialty. This influence came from European adventurers who found a refuge at the court of the Mogul, among them a Frenchman named Augustin de Bordeaux. Saracenic art, tinted by the Orientalism of India and controlled by a taste which had been formed in the schools of Europe, make a peculiar blending. The general effect is lost in the crowding together of so many objects of beauty. There is no view like those you see in Spain, in the Moorish monuments of Granada, Toledo, and Seville. The fort is on a plain, and might be a market or a barracks from all you can see on the outside, which is a blank wall. But there are bits throughout the palace which

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