King’s robe, or vest.  He pretended to be angry, and asked her, with a frown, how she could dare to besprinkle her sovereign; she replied—­“When children play together there is no distinction between the prince and the peasant.”  The King was charmed with her half-veiled beauty and spirit, and he paid a second visit the next day, and again asked for water.  He did the same as the first day, and she returned the compliment in the same way.  He came a third time and asked for water, but Mulika Zumanee had become alarmed, and it was presented by another and less dangerous person.  A few days after, however, the Queen was constrained to allow her fair attendant to attend the King, and receive from him formal proposals of marriage, which she accepted.

She was handsome and generous; but there was no discrimination in her bounty, and she is said to have received from the King nearly two millions of money out of the reserved treasury for pin-money alone.  Of this she saved forty-four lacs of rupees.  The King never touched this money, and it formed, in a separate apartment, the greater part of the seventy lacs found in his reserved treasury on his death, out of the ten krores or ten millions sterling, which he found there when he ascended the throne in 1827.

She is said to have been the only one of his wives who ever had any real affection for the King.  She was haughty and imperious in her temper; and the only female, who had any influence over her, was a Mogulanee, who taught her to read and write.  She assisted her mistress very diligently in spending her pin-money, and made the fortunes of sundry of her relations.  Altercations between the Kuduseea Begum and the King were not uncommon; but, on the 21st of August, 1834, the King became unusually excited, and told her that he had raised her from bondage to the throne, and could as easily cast her back into the same vile condition.  Her proud spirit could not brook this, and she instantly swallowed arsenic.  The King relented, and every remedy was tried, but in vain.  The King watched over her agonies till she was about to expire, when he fled in a frantic state and took refuge in the apartments of the race-stand, about three miles from the palace, till the funeral ceremonies were over.  It is said, that in her anxiety to give birth to an heir to the throne, she got the husband, from whom she had been divorced, smuggled into her apartments in the palace in a female dress more than once; and that this was reported to the King, and became the real cause of the dispute.

The Mogulanee attendant, who had accumulated twenty lacs of rupees, was seized and commanded to disgorge.  She offered five lacs to Court favourites on condition that they saw her safely over the river Ganges into British territory.  The most grave of them were commissioned to wait upon his Majesty, and entreat him most earnestly to banish her forthwith from his territories, as she was known, in the first place,