After his conviction the widow of his brother and predecessor, Khande Rao, whom he had poisoned, was allowed to exercise the right of adoption, and her choice fell upon the present gaikwar, then a lad of eleven, belonging to a collateral branch of the family.  He was provided with English tutors and afterward sent to England to complete his education.  He proved a brilliant scholar, an industrious, earnest, practical man, and, as I have said, Queen Victoria took a great personal interest in him.  When he came to the throne in 1874, he immediately applied himself with energy and intelligence to the administration of the government and surrounded himself with the best English advisers he could get.  Since his accession the condition of Baroda has entirely changed and is in striking contrast with that which existed under his predecessors.  Many taxes have been abolished and more have been reduced.  Public works have been constructed everywhere; schools, colleges, hospitals, asylums, markets, water works, electric lighting plants, manufactories and sanitary improvements have been introduced, competent courts have been established and the province has become one of the most prosperous in India.

Baroda is called “The Garden of India.”  It occupies a fine plain with rich alluvial soil, well watered, and almost entirely under cultivation.  It produces luxurious crops of grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco and other staples, and the greater part of them are turned from raw material into the finished product in factories scattered through the state.  We were advised that Baroda is the best place in India to study the native arts and fabrics.  The manufacturing is chiefly controlled by Parsees, descendants of Persian fugitives who fled to India and settled in Baroda more than a thousand years ago, and in their temple at Navasari, a thriving manufacturing town, the sacred fire has been burning uninterruptedly for five hundred years.  The City of Baroda has about 125,000 population.  The principal streets are lined with houses of teakwood, whose fronts are elaborately carved.  Their like cannot be seen elsewhere.  The maharajah keeps up the elephant stables of his predecessor in which are bred and kept the finest animals in India.  He also breeds the best oxen in the empire.

Through the good offices of Mr. Fee, our consul at Bombay, we received invitations to a Hindu wedding in high life.  The groom was a young widower, a merchant of wealth and important commercial connections, a graduate of Elphinstone College, speaks English fluently, and is a favorite with the foreign colony.  The bride was the daughter of a widow whose late husband was similarly situated, a partner in a rich mercantile and commission house, well known and respected.  The family ate liberal in their views, and the daughter has been educated at one of the American mission schools, although they still adhere to Hinduism, their ancestral religion.  The groom’s family are equally