in

were, and she was off. Sir John steamed merrily away down the river, as if conscious of having performed a meritorious action. The Irrawaddy captured her unfortunate flat once more-things were speedily set to rights every way, and, on the following day, I was landed. During the remainder of that voyage Lumba did not anchor either in a whirlpool or in six feet of water, nor, I am sorry to add, did Colonel Bunder, as I was subsequently informed, say a word, except of the most formal and complimentary character, to Mrs. Nutkut. The remainder of my journey to Delhi, which was my ultimate destination, was performed by land in a palanquin.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE PRIEST'S HAREM AT Delhi.

THE stranger, arriving for the first time in Delhi, is at once impressed, by the aspect of the town, with the conviction that he is in a city once great and mighty, but great and mighty no more. The remains of past magnificence are strewed around on every side, some mouldering under the heavy hand of time, into their primeval dust, others beautiful in their proportions, and in an excellent state of preservation, but still telling only of what has been, not of what is. The great palace of Shah Jehan, a thousand yards long, and six hundred broad, is still inhabited by the descendant of the great Moguls, the lingering representative of a dynasty that wrote their names largely on the world's his

tory, and then vanished, to give place to foreign rulers.

In solemn mockery of royal splendour, their surviving descendant, an emperor in form and a slave in fact, maintains the empty state of sovereignty. He has his throne and his sceptre, his palace and his servants, his ministers and his grand officers—the English have his kingdom. He receives like a king his foreign visitors, and decorates them with a valueless collar of tawdry tinsel; he wears jewels and royal robes, and has about him all the paraphernalia of majesty ; but the substance has fled, the shadow only has been retained.

The palace, built by Shah Jehan, is a magnificent pile-its gateway is what the entrance to a royal domain should be, grand, imposing, and magnificent. Its gardens, a mile in circumference; are still maintained as in the times when the Moguls wielded the sceptre of India, really as well as nominally, from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas.

But whilst the palace itself betrays little of the fall of Delhi, its immediate vicinity is full of monuments that speak unmistakeably of a city whose glory has departed. Long

ranges of buildings, once the palaces of the Mogul nobility, with gilded mosques, richly ornamented pavilions and magnificent tombs, are scattered about in wide confusion, forming a vast scene of ruin and desolation. Two of its streets may still be considered elegant and spacious if not grand, and the others, although narrow, contain many good houses, partly of brick and partly of stone; but every where the wanderer may meet the ruins of past magnificence, in immediate contact with the abodes of present mediocrity-a palace and a cottage in juxtaposition may be met, it is true, anywhere in the East, from Constantinople to Canton, but a palace in ruins and a well-kept cottage together, such as may be frequently seen in Delhi, is but symbolical of the decay of the princes, and the rise of the people, which we may probably regard as the inevitable results of the British conquest.

The Muhammadan quarter of Delhi is far finer than that inhabited by the Hindoos-the very houses show which were the mastersand in this Muhammadan quarter the mosque called the Jumna Musjeed is certainly the finest building. It was built by the daugh

ter of Aurungzebe, the greatest monarch the Mogul line produced, and is of red stone, inlaid with marble. Four graceful minarets, each two hundred feet high, rise at the corners, pointing ever to the skies, the fittest possible ornaments of religious buildings. Three great domes rise from the interior, of which the central one is by far the loftiest, domes that curve beautifully upwards, ending in a slender point like that of the minaret, and suggestive, too, of thoughts raised far above the earth, to the place where "the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.”

The central doorway, of lofty and imposing dimensions, is flanked by five arches on either side, that stretch off to the minarets, and above these arches is that elaborate and intricate decoration which the orientals love so well, and which astonishes the European in the Alhambra not so much by its intrinsic beauty, as by the immense quantity of labour which must have been expended upon it.

The neighbourhood of the Jumna Musjeed is all that the vicinity of such a temple should An extensive square court-yard affords

be.