n off into small square beds, where it
is evaporated by exposure to the solar heat. The gate of this fort
leading out to the road we came is called, modestly enough, after
Kumbhir, a place only ten miles distant; that leading to Mathura,
three or four stages distant, is called the Mathura gate. At Delhi,
the gates of the city walls are called ostentatiously after distant
places--the _Kashmir_, the _Kabul_, the _Constantinople_ gates.
Outside the Kumbhir gate, I saw, for the first time in my life, the
well peculiar to Upper India. It is built up in the form of a round
tower or cylindrical shell of burnt bricks, well cemented with good
mortar, and covered inside and out with good stucco work, and let
down by degrees, as the earth is removed by men at work in digging
under the light earthy or sandy foundation inside and out. This well
is about twenty feet below and twenty feet above the surface, and had
to be built higher as it was let into the ground.[6]

On the 11th we came on twelve miles to Dig (Deeg), over a plain of
poor and badly cultivated soil, which must be almost all under water
in the rains. This was, and still is, the country seat of the Jats of
Bharatpur, who rose, as I have already stated, to wealth and power by
aggressions upon their immediate neighbours, and the plunder of
tribute on its way to the imperial capital, and of the baggage of
passing armies during the contests for dominion that followed the
death of the Emperors, and during the decline and fall of the empire.
The Jats found the morasses with which they were surrounded here a
source of strength. They emigrated from the banks of the Indus about
Multan, and took up their abode by degrees on the banks of the Jumna,
and those of the Chambal, from their confluence upwards, where they
became cultivators and robbers upon a small scale, till they had the
means to build garrisons, when they entered the lists with princes,
who were only robbers upon a large scale. The Jats, like the
Marathas, rose, by a feeling of nationality, among a people who had
none. Single landholders were every day rising to principalities by
means of their gangs of robbers; but they could seldom be cemented
under one common head by a bond of national feeling.

They have a noble quadrangular garden at Dig, surrounded by a high
wall. In the centre of each of the four faces is one of the most
beautiful Hindoo buildings for accommodation that I have ever seen,
formed of a very fine