er of curious
playthings--creations of porcelain and glass--gorgeous in colouring and
ornamentation. We were not deemed worthy even to touch them, much less
could we muster up courage to ask for any to play with. Nevertheless
these rare and wonderful objects, as they were to us boys, served to
tinge with an additional attraction the lure of the inner apartments.

Thus had I been kept at arm's length with repeated rebuffs. As the outer
world, so, for me, the interior, was unattainable. Wherefore the
impressions of it that I did get appeared to me like pictures.

After nine in the evening, my lessons with Aghore Babu over, I am
retiring within for the night. A murky flickering lantern is hanging in
the long venetian-screened corridor leading from the outer to the inner
apartments. At its end this passage turns into a flight of four or five
steps, to which the light does not reach, and down which I pass into the
galleries running round the first inner quadrangle. A shaft of moonlight
slants from the eastern sky into the western angle of these verandahs,
leaving the rest in darkness. In this patch of light the maids have
gathered and are squatting close together, with legs outstretched,
rolling cotton waste into lamp-wicks, and chatting in undertones of
their village homes. Many such pictures are indelibly printed on my
memory.

Then after our supper, the washing of our hands and feet on the verandah
before stretching ourselves on the ample expanse of our bed; whereupon
one of the nurses Tinkari or Sankari comes and sits by our heads and
softly croons to us the story of the prince travelling on and on over
the lonely moor, and, as it comes to an end, silence falls on the room.
With my face to the wall I gaze at the black and white patches, made by
the plaster of the walls fallen off here and there, showing faintly in
the dim light; and out of these I conjure up many a fantastic image as I
drop off to sleep. And sometimes, in the middle of the night, I hear
through my half-broken sleep the shouts of old Swarup, the watchman,
going his rounds from verandah to verandah.

Then came the new order, when I got in profusion from this inner
unknown dreamland of my fancies the recognition for which I had all
along been pining; when that which naturally should have come day by day
was suddenly made good to me with accumulated arrears. I cannot say that
my head was not turned.

The little traveller was full of the story of his tra