Apropos of Jubbulpoor, it is well enough to remark that by the rules of Indian orthography which are now to be considered authentic, the letter “a” without an accent has a sound equivalent to short “u,” and a vowel with an acute accent has what is usually called its long sound in English.  Accordingly, the word written “Jabalpur” should be pronounced as if retaining the “u” and the “oo” with which it was formerly written, “Jubbulpoor”.  The termination pur, so common in the designation of Indian places, is equivalent to that of ville in English, and means the same.  The other common termination, abad, means “dwelling” or “residence”:  e.g., Ahmedabad, the residence of Ahmed.  Jabalpur is but about a mile from the right bank of the Nerbada (Nerbudda) River; and as I wished to see the famous Marble Rocks of that stream, which are found a short distance from Jabalpur, my companion and I here left the railway, intending to see a little of the valley of the Nerbada, and then to strike across the Vindhyas, along the valley of the Tonsa, to Bhopal, making our journey by such slow, irregular and easy stages as should be compatible with that serene and philosophic disposition into which the Hindu’s beautiful gravity had by this time quite converted my American tendencies toward rushing through life at the killing pace.

[Illustration:  CENOTAPHS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TONSA.]

It was a little past midday when we made our first journey along the river between the Marble Rocks.  Although the weather was as nearly perfect as weather could be, the mornings being deliciously cool and bracing and the nights cold enough to produce often a thin layer of ice over a pan of water left exposed till daybreak, yet the midday sun was warm enough, especially after a walk, to make one long for leaves and shade and the like.  It would be difficult, therefore, to convey the sensations with which we reclined at our ease in a flat-bottomed punt while an attendant poled us up toward the “Fall of Smoke,” where the Nerbada leaps out eagerly toward the low lands he is to fertilize, like a young poet anxious to begin his work of grace in the world.  On each side of us rose walls of marble a hundred feet in height, whose pure white was here and there striped with dark green or black:  all the colors which met the eye—­the marmoreal whites, the bluish grays of the recesses among the ledges, the green and black seams, the limpid blue of the stream—­were grateful, calm-toned, refreshing; we inhaled the coolness as if it had been a mild aroma out of a distant flower.  This pleasant fragrance, which seemed to come up out of all things, was presently intensified by a sort of spiritual counterpart—­a gentle breath that blew upon us from the mysterious regions of death; for on a ghat we saw a small company of Hindus just launching the body of a pious relative into the waters of Mother Nerbada in all that freedom from grief, and even pleasant contemplation,