and the splendor of the court, and tells of a wedding, at which the daughter of Ahmed Shah married the second son of the grand mogul.  She carried to Delhi as her dower twenty elephants, a thousand horses and six thousand wagons loaded with the richest stuffs of whatever was rare in the country.  The household of the rajah, he says, consisted of five hundred persons, and cost him five thousand pounds a month to maintain, “not comprehending the account of his stables, where he kept five hundred horses and fifty elephants.”  When this traveler visited the rajah he was sitting in a pavilion in his garden, clad in a white vestment, according to the Indian code, over which he had a cloak of gold “brocade,” the ground color being carnation lined with white satin, and above it was a collar of sable, whereof the skins were sewed together so that the tails hung over down his back.

Among the manufacturers and business men of Ahmedabad in those days, as now, were many Jains—­the Quakers of India—­who belong to the rich middle class.  They believe in peace, and are so tender-hearted that they will not even kill a mosquito or a flea.  They are great business men, however, notwithstanding their soft hearts, and the most rapid money-makers in the empire.  They built many of the most beautiful temples in India, in which they worship a kind and gentle god whose attributes are amiability, benevolence and compassion.  The Jains of Ahmedabad still maintain a large “pinjrapol,” or asylum for diseased and aged animals, with about 800 inmates, decrepit beasts of all species, by which they acquire merit with their god.  And about the streets, and in the outskirts of the city, sitting on the tops of what look like telegraph poles, are pigeon houses; some of them ornamented with carving, other painted in gay colors and all of them very picturesque.  These are rest houses for birds, which the Jains have built, and every day basins of food are placed in them for the benefit of the hungry.  In the groves outside of the city are thousands of monkeys, and they are much cleaner and more respectable in appearance than any you ever saw in a circus or a zoo.  They are as large as Italian greyhounds, and of similar color, with long hair and uncommonly long tails, and so tame they will come up to strangers who know enough to utter a call that they understand.  Our coachman bought a penny’s worth of sweet bread in one of the groceries that we passed, and when we reached the first grove he uttered a cry similar to that which New England dairymen use in calling their cattle.  In an instant monkeys began to drop from the limbs of trees that overhang the roadway, and came scampering from the corners, where they had probably been indulging in noonday naps.  In two minutes he was surrounded by thirty-eight monkeys, which leaped and capered around like so many dogs as he held the sugar cake up in the air before them.  It was a novel sight.  These monkeys are fed regularly at the expense of the Jains, and none of God’s creatures is too insignificant or irritating to escape their comprehensive benevolence.