and adds to the general poverty; a fuel whose manufacture—the gathering, kneading, and shaping into flat cakes to be slapped against a wall to dry—is such ignoble work that rarely any but women are employed in the unending task.
After these early morning sights in the streets, the fantastic Teppa Kulam was a bit of fairyland, a great tank inclosed in a striped red and white stone parapet, with a dazzling marble platform in its center upholding the most fanciful little white coroneted temple, the glorified pavilion of a confectioner's dreams, four mites of lesser pavilions reflected from each corner of the platform. We drove down shady lanes, past the elephant stables, to the garden of the English judge to see the great banian tree, whose main trunk, over seventy feet in circumference, is surrounded by a hundred lesser trunks and newly rooted filaments—a leafy hall of columns, measuring one hundred and eighty feet across.
We went to the spacious Moorish and Hindu seventeenth-century palace of the great ruler, Tirumala Nayak, and after a small boy of the neighborhood had taken us in charge and scolded, stamped his foot, and pushed an old gray-haired sweeper about, that abject being produced the keys and admitted us to cool, shadowy halls and council-chambers with richly carved and paneled ceilings, to the king's bedchamber, where a carved and gilded bed once swung by chains from latticed ceilings, and down whose chains the clever thief slid to steal the crown jewels; and from the terraced roof where the prime minister used to dwell we saw the whole,
