tle. Since the beginning of time, if we are to credit the
legends, there was fighting--heroic fighting--at the foot of the
Aravalis and beyond, in the great deserts of sand penned by those kindly
mountains from spreading over the heart of India. The "Thirty-six Royal
Races" fought as royal races know how to do, Chohan with Rahtor, brother
against brother, son against father. Later--but excerpts from the
tangled tale of force, fraud, cunning, desperate love and more desperate
revenge, crime worthy of demons and virtues fit for gods, may be found,
by all who care to look, in the book of the man who loved the Rajputs
and gave a life's labours in their behalf. From Delhi to Abu, and from
the Indus to the Chambul, each yard of ground has witnessed slaughter,
pillage, and rapine. But, to-day, the capital of the State, that Dhola
Rae, son of Soora Singh, hacked out more than nine hundred years ago
with the sword from some weaker ruler's realm, is lighted with gas, and
possesses many striking and English peculiarities.

Dhola Rae was killed in due time, and for nine hundred years Jeypore,
torn by the intrigues of unruly princes and princelings, fought
Asiatically.

When and how Jeypore became a feudatory of British power and in what
manner we put a slur upon Rajput honour--punctilious as the honour of
the Pathan--are matters of which the Globe-trotter knows more than we
do. He "reads up"--to quote his own words--a city before he comes to us,
and, straightway going to another city, forgets, or, worse still, mixes
what he has learnt--so that in the end he writes down the Rajput a
Mahratta, says that Lahore is in the Northwest Provinces, and was once
the capital of Sivaji, and piteously demands a "guide-book on all India,
a thing that you can carry in your trunk y' know--that gives you plain
descriptions of things without mixing you up." Here is a chance for a
writer of discrimination and void of conscience!

But to return to Jeypore--a pink city set on the border of a blue lake,
and surrounded by the low, red spurs of the Aravalis--a city to see and
to puzzle over. There was once a ruler of the State, called Jey Singh,
who lived in the days of Aurungzeb, and did him service with foot and
horse. He must have been the Solomon of Rajputana, for through the
forty-four years of his reign his "wisdom remained with him." He led
armies, and when fighting was over, turned to literature; he intrigued
desperately and successfully, but fou