HE stars were shining out of a dark and glowing sky when my servant came into the room and said that the time had come for the train. In this country

you must not expect trains at your convenience. The main object is to travel in the night. Although at home it would be almost a barbarism to keep the hours enforced upon you in India, here you take all the advantage you can of the night. The cars are built for the night, and are the nearest approach I have seen to our American models for comfort. We drove to the Jeypore station under a full starlight, as it was important we should be on our way to Agra before the sun was up. But on reaching the station we learned that some mishap had fallen the train, and we had to kill time at the station as best we could, and study the beauty of an Indian sun

BHURTPOOR.

39 rise. That itself was something to see, especially with such a background to the picture as the Oriental city of Jeypore and the brown empurpled hills beyond. But the railway is a new thing in Rajpootana, and has not learned the value of promptitude. In time we were off and on our way to Futtehpoor Sikra.

It had been arranged that we should go to Agra by breaking the journey at Bhurtpoor, driving over to the ruins of Futtehpoor Sikra, and remaining there all night. The Maharajah of Bhurtpoor is a young prince about thirty years of age. His name is Maharajah Seswaut Singh. His state is small, its area 1,974 square miles, with a population of 743,710, and a revenue of between fourteen and fifteen millions of dollars a year. The Maharajah is descended from a freebooter named Brij, who owned a village, and in time made his village into a state. The fortunes of the state have not always been prosperous. It had the fortune that so often attends small states bordering on larger ones the fortune of so disturbing the rest and dignity of the larger neighbors that robbery and annexation became necessary. Bhurtpoor was taken by the old Delhi rulers. Then Sindia came and seized it. In 1805, when Lord Lake was loose in India at the head of a small conquering army, he came upon Bhurtpoor. The town had given refuge to Holkar, a prince at war with the English, and Lord Lake attempted to carry it by storm. In this he failed, losing 3,000 men. The English compromised, and took $1,000,000 as the price of not continuing the war. The memory of that defeat long lingered in India, and was the theme of many a song and story in native bazaars. In 1826 there was a quarrel in the house of Bhurtpoor. The father of the present Maharajah was seized and imprisoned by his cousin. The English interfered, and the result was the invasion of the state by an army of 20,000 men and 100 guns. It is difficult to see what honest motive could have induced the Indian government to throw so large an army into another state, but the one point not wise to dwell upon in reading Indian history is motives. The town was invested, the gates blown up, and 6,000 men killed in the assault, the English losing 1,000. The usurping prince was

sent to Benares on a pension of $3,000 a year. Although the avowed motive of the invasion of Bhurtpoor was to restore a prince and secure his rights, as soon as the British came into the town they plundered it. The state jewels were taken. Over $2,000,000 from the treasury was divided among the soldiers; the commander, Lord Combermere, who died not long since, one of the oldest of the British generals, and universally praised as a fine type of the old-fashioned sturdy officer and nobleman, put $300,000 of the money in his pocket. The walls

of the town were leveled, and the prince, father to the present ruler, was restored to a crown which had been robbed of its jewels, a treasury which had been robbed of its treasure, a town which had been robbed of its walls, a palace which had been robbed of its adornments. Considering that the founder of the house was a good deal of a robber himself, I suppose there was not a serious invasion of the moral law in taking from Bhurtpoor what his ancestors had taken from somebody else. One does not like to read these things of an English

THE MAHARAJAH OF BHURTPOOR.

41

peer and an English army. But the painful fact is that you can hardly open a page in the history of India without stumbling upon some incident that recalls the taking of Bhurtpoor.

The

The day was hot and the ride had been through a low country, the scenery not attractive at the best, but now brown and arid under a scorching sun. We were in a frowsy condition, early rising, long waiting, and an Indian atmosphere not contributing to the comforts of travel. About noon the blare of trumpets and the rolling of the drums told us we were at Bhurtpoor. Putting ourselves together as best we could, and throwing off the sluggishness and apathy of travel, we descended. All Bhurtpoor was out at the station, and the Maharajah at the head. The Prince was accompanied by the British officers attached to his court, and, advancing, shook hands with the General and welcomed him to his capital. Maharajah looks older than his years, but this is a trait of most Indian princes. He wore a blazing uniform, covered with jewels. He has a firm, stern face, with strong features, a good frame, and, unlike his brother of Jeypore-who gives his days. to prayers and his evenings to billiards, and although he has the Star of India, has long since seen the vanity of human glory and hates power-is a soldier and a sportsman, and is called a firm and energetic ruler. He would make a good model for Byron's Lambro, and there was a stern, haughty grace in his unsmiling face. From the station we drove to the palace, into a town whose dismantled walls speak of English valor and English shame, past bazaars, where people seemed to sell nothing, only to broil in the sunshine, and under a high archway into a courtyard, and thence to the palace. There was nothing special about the palace except that it was very large and very uncomfortable. The decorations were odd. There were one or two bits of valuable china, prints of an American circus entering London, an oil painting of our Saviour, various prints. of the French and English royal families taken forty years ago. There were the Queen, the Prince Consort, Louis Philippe, Montpensier, and all the series of loyal engravings in vogue at the time of the Spanish marriages; all young and fresh and

smiling faces, some of them now worn and gray, some vanished into silence. The palace seemed to be a kind of store-room, in which the keepers had stored everything that came along, and as you walked from wall to wall, passing from cheap circus showbills to steel engravings of Wellington and oil paintings of our Lord, the effect was ludicrous. The Prince does not live in this palace, but in one more suited to Oriental tastes. It was here where he received the Prince of Wales on the occasion of his visit in 1876. There was a breakfast prepared, which the Prince left us to enjoy in company with our English friends. You know in this country the hospitality of the highest princes never goes so far as to ask you to eat. The rules of caste are so marked that the partaking of food with one of another caste, and especially of another race, would be defilement. Our host, at the close of the breakfast, returned in state, and there was the ceremony of altar and pan and cordial interchanges of good feeling between the Maharajah and the General.

It was arranged that on our way to Agra we should visit the famous ruins of Futtehpoor Sikra. In the days of the great Mohammedan rulers there was none so great as Akbar. One of the trials to which this rich country-unfortunate India -has been subjected is that with every age there comes a new conqueror, a tide of new invaders. The law of The law of conquest that the North should invade the South, that the sons of the snow should overmaster the children of the sun, that the men of the mountain should put their feet on the men of the valley, has had no better illustration than in the checkered destiny of Hindostan. It was a part of the marvelous career of Islam that its soldiers should come with fire and sword into these plains of Northern India. In 1565, about the time when the Spaniard was carrying the Cross into America, making his way into Mexico and the United States, and rooting out the glorious remnants of Arabian civilization in Andalusia, a Mohammedan prince fought the battle of Kistna. The Hindoos, under their rajah, gathered a mighty army, in which there were 20,000 elephants and 600 cannon. But all this power was unavailing, and