st needs have been a mighty sentiment, for the conditions which
Hurdeo Sing exacted were of a nature to try the strongest love. These
were, that the nuptial banquet should be prepared by the unmentionable
hands of the slave wife herself, and that the king and his court
should partake of it--a proceeding which would involve the loss of
their caste also. But the prince loved, and his love must have lent
him extraordinary eloquence, for he prevailed on his royal father to
accept the disgrace. If one could only stop here, and record that he
won his bride, succeeded his magnanimous old parent on the throne,
lived a long and happy life with his queen, and finally died regretted
by his loving people! But this is in the Bundelcund, and the facts
are, that the treacherous Hurdeo Sing caused opium to be secretly put
into all the dishes of the wedding-feast, and when the unsuspecting
revelers were completely stupefied by the drug had the whole party
assassinated, after which he possessed himself of the throne and
founded the Bundelcund.

One does not wonder that the hills and forests of such a land became
the hiding-places of the strangling Thugs, the home of the poisoning
Dacoits, the refuge of conspirators and insurgents and the terror of
Central India.

As for Jhansi, the district in whose capital we were now sojourning,
its people must have tasted many of the sorrows of anarchy and of
despotism even in recent times. It was appurtenant no long time ago to
the Bundela rajah of Ourcha: from him it passed by conquest into the
possession of the Peishwa. These small districts were all too handy
for being tossed over as presents to favorites: one finds them falling
about among the greedy subordinates of conquerors like nuts thrown out
to school-boys. The Peishwa gave Jhansi to a soubahdar: the British
government then appeared, and effected an arrangement by which the
soubahdar should retain it as hereditary rajah on the annual payment
of twenty-four thousand rupees. This so-called rajah, Ramchund Rao,
died without issue in 1835. Amid great disputes as to the succession
the British arbitrators finally decided in favor of Rugonath Rao; but
new quarrels straightway arose, a great cry being made that Rugonath
Rao was a leper, and that a leper ought not to be a rajah. His death
in some three years settled that difficulty, only to open fresh
ones among the conflicting claimants. These perplexing questions the
British finally concluded qu