ronmongery, parade before
their admiring friends. Others, lean, dark men, with bound jaws and only
a tulwar for weapon, dive in and out of the dark alleys, on errands of
State. It is a beautifully lazy city, doing everything in the real,
true, original native way, and it is kept in very good order by the
Durbar. There either is or is not an order for everything. There is no
order to sell fishing-hooks, or to supply an Englishman with milk, or
to change for him currency notes. He must only deal with the Durbar for
whatever he requires; and wherever he goes he must be accompanied by at
least two armed men. They will tell him nothing, for they know or affect
to know nothing of the city. They will do nothing except shout at the
little innocents who joyfully run after the stranger and demand _pice_,
but there they are, and there they will stay till he leaves the city,
accompanying him to the gate, and waiting there a little to see that he
is fairly off and away. Englishmen are not encouraged in Boondi. The
intending traveller would do well to take a full suit of Political
uniform with the sunflowers, and the little black sword to sit down
upon. The local god is the "Agenty Sahib," and he is an incarnation
without a name--at least among the lower classes. The educated, when
speaking of him, always use the courtly "Bahadur" affix; and yet it is a
mean thing to gird at a State which, after all, is not bound to do
anything for intrusive Englishmen without any visible means of
livelihood. The King of this fair city should declare the blockade
absolute, and refuse to be troubled with any one except "Colon-nel
Baltah, Agenty Sahib Bahadur" and the Politicals. If ever a railway is
run through Kotah, as men on the Bombay side declare it must be, the
cloistered glory of Boondi will depart, for Kotah is only twenty miles
easterly of the city and the road is moderately good. In that day the
Globe-trotter will pry about the place, and the Charitable Dispensary--a
gem among dispensaries--will be public property.

The Englishman was hunting for the statue of a horse, a great horse
hight Hunja, who was a steed of Irak, and a King's gift to Rao Omeda,
one time monarch of Boondi. He found it in the city square as Tod had
said; and it was an unlovely statue, carven after the dropsical fashion
of later Hindu art. No one seemed to know anything about it. A little
further on, one cried from a byway in rusty English: "Come and see my
Dispensary."