a King, and though we fain would linger in the past the all-engulfing present sweeps us on.
The rows and rows of tents seemed never-ending—a vast canvas city of which even India, the land of tents, can hardly have seen the like before. Certainly not a city of tents like these. For above all, even above the vastness of it all, it was the trimness, the neatness, the exact precision, that struck one most. Not a rope was out of line, not a tent diverging by so much as an inch from its appointed place. It was just typical of the Durbar all through—an object-lesson of what the British have done. It has taken the mighty forces of this vast country, and swept them into line. Where all was confusion and disorder, chief against chief, an Empire divided against itself, crumbling to decay, the genius of the British race has slowly but surely imposed its will, welding all the discordant and conflicting elements into one united and harmonious whole—a triumph that has never been before achieved in all the countless ages of the history of Hindustan, Nothing was more striking at the Durbar than to watch the untutored, undrilled crowds gaping at this outward and visible sign of the order and precision that had swept them aside, and so wisely and firmly imposed its rule upon them.
Encampment after encampment we passed by, each in its own allotted space, smart sentries at the gates, water-carriers passing up and down the trim gravel paths between the tents with their huge skin water-bottles that again reminded one, as one so often is reminded in the East, of one's early child-
