eader wounded and taken prisoner.

An hour later, another hostile body, about five {115} thousand
strong, appeared in sight. These too were disposed of, and their
leader was killed. In the battle and in the pursuit the rebels lost
about two thousand men. Akbar then advanced to Ahmadabad, rested
there five days, engaged in rewarding the deserving, and in arranging
for the permanent security of the province. He then marched to
Mahmudabad, a town in the Kaira district, and thence to Sirohi. From
Sirohi he went direct to Ajmere, visited there the mausoleum of the
famous saint, thence, marching night and day, stopped at a village
about fourteen miles from Jaipur to arrange with Raja Todar Mall,
whom he met there, one of the ablest of his officers, afterwards to
become Diwan, or Chancellor, of the Empire, regarding the mode of
levying the revenues of Gujarat. From that village the Emperor
proceeded direct to Fatehpur-Sikri, where he arrived in triumph,
after an absence of forty-three days.

His plan of bringing under his sceptre the whole of India had so far
matured that he ruled now, at the end of the eighteenth year of his
reign, over North-western, Central, and Western India, inclusive of
the Punjab and Kabul. Eastward, his authority extended to the banks
of the Karamnasa. Beyond that river lay Behar and Bengal,
independent, and under certain circumstances threatening danger. He
had fully resolved, then, that unless the unforeseen should occur,
the nineteenth year of his reign should be devoted to the conquest of
Bengal and the states tributary to Bengal. Before setting out on the
{116} expedition, however, he paid another visit to the tomb of the
saint on the hill of Ajmere.

I have written much in the more recent pages of the marches of Akbar,
and the progress of his armies, but up to the present I have not
referred to the principle on which those movements were made. There
have been warriors, even within the memory of living men, who have
made war support war. Upon that principle acted the Khorasani and
Afghan barbarians who invaded India when the Mughal power was
tottering to its fall. But that principle was not the principle of
Akbar. Averse to war, except for the purpose of completing the
edifice he was building, and which, but for such completion, would,
he well knew, remain unstable, liable to be overthrown by the first
storm, he took care that neither the owners nor the tillers of the
soil should be injuriousl