ed with supernatural ingenuity to
delight the eye--fields, orchards, dwellings, rivers and lakes sprinkled
with green and flowery islets and ploughed by boats of varied form and
size navigated by _hanjis_ (boatmen) whose intelligent countenances,
sculpturesque figures and graceful costumes harmonize admirably with the
enchanting scenery; innumerable brooks and canals curving capriciously
among lawns and rice-meadows and glittering in the sun like ribbons shot
with silver."

This portrait leaves out the temples and villas, ancient and modern, the
terraces and pavilions edged with the lotus and overhung with vines and
plane trees, the Shalmiar Bagh, or Garden of Delight, and the Mishat
Bagh, or Garden of Pleasure, where wine-loving Jehangir and his
beautiful consort Nur Jahan, the Light of the World, luxuriated in the
summers of long ago. This potentate declared that he would rather lose
all the rest of his vast and affluent empire than Kashmir. It furnished
a place of refreshing retreat for his energies and his conscience, the
load of the latter being fully up to the average of an Eastern
despot's. By these lulling waters and under this embowering verdure he
could shut out from the sight and memory such spectacles as that to
which he had treated his rebellious son Khosrou--a long row of seven
hundred of the latter's accomplices seated in solemn gravity, but not
returning his salute as he was led along, for the sufficient if not
immediately perceptible reason that they sat upon thorns, each upon one
thorn a foot or so long, of iron. We may suppose the father of Frederick
the Great to have had in mind this passage of Oriental life when he
forced the prince to witness the execution of his young friend Katte.

Wilson's preference is for the Garden of Pleasure, notwithstanding the
elegance of that of Delight. It looks out upon Lake Dal, the Golden
Island in front:

"Ten terraces, bounded by magnificent trees and with a stream of water
falling over them, lead up to the latticed pavilion at the end of this
garden. Between the double stories of this pavilion the stream flows
through a marble--or at least a limestone--tank, and the structure is
shaded by great _chunar_ trees, while through a vista of their splendid
foliage we look down the terraces and water-courses upon the lake
below."

A fit dreaming-place this for the lotus-eating monarch of a lotus-eating
people. The lake is so full of the lotus and other water-lilies th