nt are a few days
spent within her gates, but ... read what Tod said who stayed two years
behind the Dobarra, and accepted the deserts of Marwar as a delightful
change.

It is good to be free, a wanderer upon the highways, knowing not what
to-morrow will bring forth--whether the walled-in niceties of an English
household, rich in all that makes life fair and desirable, or a
sleepless night in the society of a
goods-_cum_-booking-office-_cum_-parcels-clerk, on fifteen rupees a
month, who tells in stilted English the story of his official life,
while the telegraph gibbers like a maniac once in an hour and then is
dumb, and the pariah-dogs fight and howl over the cotton-bales on the
platform.

Verily, there is no life like life on the road--when the skies are cool
and all men are kind.

X

A LITTLE OF THE HISTORY OF CHITOR, AND THE MALPRACTICES OF A
SHE-ELEPHANT.

There is a certain want of taste, an almost actual indecency, in seeing
the sun rise on the earth. Until the heat-haze begins and the distances
thicken, Nature is so very naked that the Actaeon who has surprised her
dressing, blushes. Sunrise on the plains of Mewar is an especially
brutal affair.

The moon was burnt out and the air was bitterly cold, when the
Englishman headed due east in his tonga, and the patient sowar behind
nodded and yawned in the saddle. There was no warning of the day's
advent. The horses were unharnessed, at one halting-stage, in the thick,
soft shadows of night, and ere their successors had limped under the
bar, a raw and cruel light was upon all things, so that the Englishman
could see every rent seam in the rocks around. A little further, and he
came upon the black bulk of Chitor between him and the morning sun. It
has already been said that the Fort resembles a man-of-war. Every
distant view heightens this impression, for the swell of the sides
follows the form of a ship, and the bastions on the south wall make the
sponsons in which the machine-guns are mounted. From bow to stern, the
thing more than three miles long, is between three and five hundred feet
high, and from one-half to one-quarter of a mile broad. Have patience,
now, to listen to a rough history of Chitor.

In the beginning, no one knows clearly who scraped the hillsides of the
hill rising out of the bare plain, and made of it a place of strength.
It is written that, eleven and a half centuries ago, Bappa Rawul, the
demi-god whose stature was twenty cu