royal father to accept the disgrace.  If one could only stop here, and record that he won his bride, succeeded his magnanimous old parent on the throne, lived a long and happy life with his queen, and finally died regretted by his loving people!  But this is in the Bundelcund, and the facts are, that the treacherous Hurdeo Sing caused opium to be secretly put into all the dishes of the wedding-feast, and when the unsuspecting revelers were completely stupefied by the drug had the whole party assassinated, after which he possessed himself of the throne and founded the Bundelcund.

One does not wonder that the hills and forests of such a land became the hiding-places of the strangling Thugs, the home of the poisoning Dacoits, the refuge of conspirators and insurgents and the terror of Central India.

As for Jhansi, the district in whose capital we were now sojourning, its people must have tasted many of the sorrows of anarchy and of despotism even in recent times.  It was appurtenant no long time ago to the Bundela rajah of Ourcha:  from him it passed by conquest into the possession of the Peishwa.  These small districts were all too handy for being tossed over as presents to favorites:  one finds them falling about among the greedy subordinates of conquerors like nuts thrown out to school-boys.  The Peishwa gave Jhansi to a soubahdar:  the British government then appeared, and effected an arrangement by which the soubahdar should retain it as hereditary rajah on the annual payment of twenty-four thousand rupees.  This so-called rajah, Ramchund Rao, died without issue in 1835.  Amid great disputes as to the succession the British arbitrators finally decided in favor of Rugonath Rao; but new quarrels straightway arose, a great cry being made that Rugonath Rao was a leper, and that a leper ought not to be a rajah.  His death in some three years settled that difficulty, only to open fresh ones among the conflicting claimants.  These perplexing questions the British finally concluded quite effectually by assuming charge of the government themselves, though this was attended with trouble, for the stout old mother of Ramchund Rao made armed resistance from the fort or castellated residence of the rajahs, which stands on its great rock overlooking the town of Jhansi.  A commission finally decreed the succession to Baba Gunghadar Rao, but retained the substantial power until the revenues had recovered from the depression consequent upon these anarchic disturbances.

[Illustration:  BURIAL PLACE OF THE RAJAHS OF JHANSI.]

“At any rate,” I said as Bhima Gandharva finished this narrative while we were walking about the burial-place of the rajahs of Jhansi, and occupying ourselves with tracing the curious admixture of Moslem with Hindu architecture presented by the tombs, “these rajahs, if they loved each other but little in life, appear to have buried each other with proper enough observances:  the cenotaphs are worthy of tenderer remembrances.”