he Nabob's palace, and made my way to
the treasury, where I found Mr. Watts and some others busily engaged
in taking an inventory of everything it contained, which was to be
shipped down the river in boats to Calcutta.

I walked through the rooms looking about me. Never in my life have I
seen, nor am I like to see such a sight again. So much treasure was
there scattered around me, that I could scarce believe it when Mr.
Watts told me that the whole was insufficient to meet the sums pledged
by Meer Jaffier. In every room I feasted my eyes upon the light of
countless jewels. Silver was heaped on every floor, and gold on every
shelf. Great green jade jars contained nothing but uncut gems. All
kinds of weapons were there, their very shapes disguised under the
gold and jewel-work which loaded them. There were chairs of ivory, and
a table of solid agate-stone. Massy chains of gold trailed from
drawers, and bricks of silver were built up into banks along the
walls. It was a confusion of magnificence, a very litter of precious
things.

I informed Mr. Watts of the permission which Colonel Clive had given
me to help myself, and he confirmed it.

"Take what you please," he said carelessly. "You will find the
emeralds run larger than any other stone, but some of them are flawed.
There is a pretty string of rubies somewhere that it might be worth
while to choose. The biggest diamond is already promised, but there
are several lesser ones, uncut, which I should judge to be worth from
twenty to forty thousand rupees each."

He returned to his catalogue, and I to my exploration. After rejecting
many necklaces and crowns that I did not deem to be of sufficient
splendour, I finally fixed upon a tulwar, which I found in a box of
mother-of-pearl by itself. The handle was set with an enormous
sapphire, and the hilt incrusted with diamonds, some of them as big as
my thumbnail. I was afterwards offered three thousand pounds for it by
a Gentoo merchant in Calcutta, but preferred to bring it home with me,
where it afterwards fetched more than double that sum at a goldsmith's
in Covent Garden.

Nor was this all that I brought away with me, for when I went to take
leave of Meer Jaffier, he presented me, as a mark of his esteem, with
a very handsome dress of gold cloth, and a string of pearls, valued
afterwards at a thousand pounds. So that I was now become a rich man.

We buried Marian at night, by the Nabob's permission, in a corner of
th