bright little station, draped with great
blue and pink convolvulus. And this was Udaipur.

We were picked out of the usual jabbering, jostling, gibbering crowd of
natives by our host, who, looking most enviably cool and clean, took his
heated, dishevelled, and unbarbered guests off to a comfortable carriage,
and we were quickly sped towards tiffin and a bath.

The station is a long way from the town, as the Maharana, a most staunch
conservative of the old school, having the railway more or less forced
upon him, drew the line at three miles from his capital, and fixed the
terminus there. One cannot help being glad that the prosaic steam-engine,
crowned with foul smoke and heralded by ear-piercing whistles, has not
been allowed to trespass in Udaipur, wherein no discordant note is struck
by train line or factory chimney, and where everything and every one is as
when the city was newly built on the final abandonment of Chitor, the
ancient capital of Mewar.

Here in the heart of the most conservative of native States, whose ruler,
the Maharana, Sir Fateh Singh, claims descent from that ancient luminary
the Sun, we found novelty and interest in every yard of the three miles
that stretch between the station and the capital. The scrub-covered desert
has given place to a wooded and cultivated valley, ringed by a chain of
hills, sterile and steep. The white ribbon of the road, through whose dust
plough stolid buffaloes and strings of creaking bullock-carts, is bordered
by tall cactus and yellow-flowered mimosa on either side. Among the trees
rise countless half-ruined temples and chatries; on whose whitewashed
walls are frequent frescoes of tigers or elephants rampant, and of
wonderful Rajput heroes wearing the curious bell-shaped skirt, which was
their distinctive dress.

The people too, their descendants, who crowd the road to-day, are
remarkable--the men fine-looking, with beards brushed ferociously upwards,
and all but the mere peasants carrying swords; the women, dark-eyed, and
singularly graceful in their red or orange saris, and very full
bell-shaped petticoats. Upright as darts, they walk with slightly swaying
gesture, a slender brown arm upraised to support the big brass chatties on
their heads, revealing an incredible collection of bangles on arms and
ankles. These women are the descendants of those who, in the stormy days
of the sixteenth century, while the Rajput princes still struggled
heroically with the all-pow