,'

6. It can no longer be said that universities do not exist, at least
in name, in India. Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Lahore, and Allahabad
are the seats of universities, and new foundations at Dacca and Patna
are promised (1914). The Indian universities, when first established,
were mere examining bodies, on the model of the University of London.
But changes, initiated by Lord Curzon, are in progress, and the
University of London is being remodelled (1914). The Indian
institutions are not frequented by young princes and nobles, and have
little influence on their education. Attempts have been made, with
partial success, to provide special boarding schools, or 'Chiefs'
Colleges', for the sons of ruling princes and native nobles. The most
notable of such institution are the colleges at Ajmer, Rajkot in
Kathiawar, and Indore. The influence of the zanana is invariably
directed against every proposal to remove a young nobleman from home
for the purpose of education, and obstacles of many kinds render the
task of rightly educating such a youth extraordinarily difficult and
unsatisfactory. In some cases a considerable degree of success has
been attained.

7. Armed follower. The word is more familiar in the corrupt form
'sepoy'.

CHAPTER 35

Gwalior Plain once the Bed of a Lake--Tameness of Peacocks.

On the 19th, 20th, and 21st[1] we came on forty miles to the village
of Antri in the Gwalior territory, over a fine plain of rich alluvial
soil under spring crops. This plain bears manifest signs of having
been at no very remote period, like the kingdom of Bohemia, the bed
of a vast lake bounded by the ranges of sandstone hills which now
seem to skirt the horizon all round; and studded with innumerable
islands of all shapes and sizes, which now rise abruptly in all
directions out of the cultivated plain.[2] The plain is still like
the unruffled surface of a vast lake; and the rich green of the
spring crops, which cover the surface in one wide sheet unintersected
by hedges, tends to keep up the illusion, which the rivers have
little tendency to dispel; for, though they have cut their way down
immense depths to their present beds through this soft alluvial
deposit, the traveller no sooner emerges from the hideous ravines,
which disfigure their banks, than he loses all trace of them. Their
course is unmarked by trees, large shrubs, or any of the signs which
mark the course of rivers in other quarters.

The soil over