people have a notion that the mushrooms
always come up best after a thunderstorm. Electricity has certainly
much more to do in the business of the world than we are yet aware
of, in the animal, mineral, and vegetable developments.[4]

At our ground this day, I met a very respectable and intelligent
native revenue officer who had been employed to settle some boundary
disputes between the yeomen of our territory and those of the
adjoining territory of Dholpur.

'The Honourable Company's rights and those of its yeomen must', said
he, 'be inevitably sacrificed in all such cases; for the Dholpur
chief, or his minister, says to all their witnesses, "You are, of
course, expected to speak the truth regarding the land in dispute;
but, by the sacred stream of the Ganges, if you speak so as to lose
this estate one inch of it, you lose both your ears"--and most
assuredly would they lose them,' continued he, 'if they were not to
swear most resolutely that all the land in question belonged to
Dholpur. Had I the same power to cut off the ears of witnesses on our
side, we should meet on equal terms. Were I to threaten to cut them
off, they would laugh in my face.' There was much truth in what the
poor man said, for the Dholpur witnesses always make it appear that
the claims of their yeomen are just and moderate, and a salutary
dread of losing their ears operates, no doubt, very strongly. The
threatened punishment of the prince is quick, while that of the gods,
however just, is certainly very slow--

Ut sit magna, tamen certe lenta ira deorum est.

On the 1st of January, 1836, we went on sixteen miles to Agra, and,
when within about six miles of the city, the dome and minarets of the
Taj opened upon us from behind a small grove of fruit-trees, close by
us on the side of the road. The morning was not clear, but it was a
good one for a first sight of this building, which appeared larger
through the dusty haze than it would have done through a clear sky.
For five-and-twenty years of my life had I been looking forward to
the sight now before me. Of no building on earth had I heard so much
as of this, which contains the remains of the Emperor Shah Jahan and
his wife, the father and mother of the children whose struggles for
dominion have been already described. We had ordered our tents to be
pitched in the gardens of this splendid mausoleum, that we might have
our fill of the enjoyment which everybody seemed to derive from it;
and we