e flourishing town is now but a
handful of miserable huts. Miles of rich lands, once clothed with
luxuriant crops of rice, indigo, and waving grain, are now barren
reaches of burning sand. The bleached skeletons of mango, jackfruit,
and other trees, stretch out their leafless and lifeless branches, to
remind the spectator of the time when their foliage rustled in the
breeze, when their lusty limbs bore rich clusters of luscious fruit,
and when the din of the bazaar resounded beneath their welcome shade.
A fine old lady still lived in a two-storied brick building, with
quaint little darkened rooms, and a narrow verandah running all round
the building. She was long past the allotted threescore years and ten,
with a keen yet mildly beaming eye, and a wealth of beautiful hair as
white as driven snow, neatly gathered back from her shapely forehead.
She was the last remaining link connecting the present with the past
glories of Nathpore. Her husband had been a planter and Zemindar.
Where his vats had stood laden with rich indigo, the engulphing sand
now reflected the rays of the torrid sun from its burning whiteness.
She shewed me a picture of the town as it appeared to her when she had
been brought there many a long and weary year ago, ere yet her step
had lost its lightness, and when she was in the bloom of her bridal
life. There was a fine broad boulevard, shadowed by splendid trees, on
which she and her husband had driven in their carriage of an evening,
through crowds of prosperous and contented traders and cultivators.
The hungry river had swept all this away. Subsisting on a few
precarious rents of some little plots of ground that it had spared,
all that remained of a once princely estate, this good old lady lived
her lonely life cheerful and contented, never murmuring or repining.
The river had not spared even the graves of her departed dear ones.
Since I left that part of the country I hear that she has been called
away to join those who had gone before her.

I arrived at her house late in the afternoon. I had never been at
Nathpore before, although the place was well known to me by
reputation. What a wreck it presented as our elephants marched
through. Ruined, dismantled, crumbling temples; masses of masonry half
submerged in the swift-running, treacherous, undermining stream; huge
trees lying prostrate, twisted and jammed together where the angry
flood had hurled them; bare unsightly poles and piles, sticking from