practicable, but Steele declined to accept his verdict and intrigued to secure a private audience of the Mogul. Eventually, through the agency of an English artist who had been brought out for Jehangir's service, he was admitted to the interior of the palace. As soon as he had entered the sacred precincts the chief eunuch "put a cloth over his head that he should not see the women," and he missed what would, no doubt, have been an interesting spectacle, though he heard the fair ones as they passed close to him. On another occasion the attendant, in an obliging mood, used a very thin cloth to blind Steele, and he was enabled to obtain a glimpse of the ladies, "there being of them some hundreds." Possessing a knowledge of Persian—the Court language—Steele was able to prosecute his suit independently, but the project did not appeal to Jehangir, and he was given to understand that it would not be entertained. His wife, who had come out as a maid to Mrs. Towerson, was befriended by a great lady who was Jehangir's hostess at Ahmedabad, and through her influence he secured such a strong position that Roe became seriously alarmed for his own prestige. But his fickle Court patrons eventually abandoned him, as they had done others, and he was glad to take passage with Roe when he returned to England in 1619. He did not again set foot in the country, though he was employed for a time under the Company in Java.
Strangest of this band of English adventurers who kept Roe in countenance in his days of exile at the Mogul Court was that amusing, eccentric Thomas Coryat, "the Odcombe leg stretcher," who is famous in English literature as the author of Coryat's Crudities, the most whimsical book on Continental travel that was probably ever penned.
