crammed with "specials." We stationed ourselves on a small mound, under some shady trees; the eclipse began about midday, when the moon could just be seen overlapping the edge of the sun. Through smoked glasses, telescopes, and glasses of every kind, the great concourse of people gazed at it, and the excitement grew intense as the moon drew farther and farther across the sun. It became perceptibly cooler. The thousands of spectators, watches in hand, were almost breathless as 1.43 p.m. approached—the time of totality. The sky began to turn blue-green like twilight, the stretches of burnt yellow plain around us assumed a brown hue, which spread over the horizon and the sky immediately above it. Every man's face turned a horrid, sickly yellow in the weird light. Dimmer and yet more dim-a hush was over the murmuring crowd; 1.43, and the moon glided entirely across the sun, showing us nothing but a large black body hanging in the sky. Venus glimmered through the green and yellow haze, and another star or two shone, the grass looked more purple than before, and the colour of the whole dark world was unique. Two minutes passed, and then suddenly a bright light flashed from the edge of the moon. The Sun-The Sun! The tension was over, a wild cheer broke simultaneously from the whole throng as the brilliant edge of the lord of creation slid from behind its temporary screen, and once more lit the earth. A fresh breeze sprang up; the ghostly light faded gradually away; but all the rest of the day the marked coolness of the air showed the result of banishing sunlight for a couple and a half hours, only totally banishing it for two minutes. Buxar did not tempt us to linger, for having so lately left England, we felt even that January heat. The Punjab would be much cooler. Thirty-two hours training saw us arrived at Lahore station, thence driving out to Mian Mir, the military station, where we stayed with General Sir George Wolseley, then officiating in the Punjab command vice Sir William Lockhart. The pig-sticking season was by this time in full swing; and our whole party from Mian Mir was invited to stay in one of the few remaining native states by H.H. Maharajah Sir Jagatjit Sing Bahadur, K.C.S.I. It was a short journey from Lahore, and at the station, which was five miles' drive from Kapurthalah, we were met by landaus, and bullock carts for our luggage. The Maharajah put us up at his Guest House, a luxurious bungalow built in charming gardens, next the Palace. It was very French in its decorations, and a trifle over-gilded perhaps; but after the somewhat rough-and-ready Punjab arrangements, that was a pardonable sin. The shady portico over the hall door was full of ferns and flowers, and the gardens afforded officious malis (gardeners) ample opportunities of pressing on us whenever we came gorgeous buttonholes A French chef fed us, and our own personal servants waited on us. Soon after we arrived, a State call was paid upon us by the Maharajah and his orderly officer. His Royal Highness was twenty-five years old, though I should have put him down as at least ten years older ; but those who have been born to absolute power, who have never known a thwarted desire, and who have been reared under the fiercest sun in the world, age even more quickly than the ordinary sons of the East, who are self-possessed men when they should be bashful babies. Kapurthalah spoke French as well as English, and was dressed like a sahib, except that he wore a vast turban and a diamond brooch. We sat down and talked for a short time, until we suggested that we must detain our visitors any longer, without which intimation an Oriental does not take his leave. Ten minutes later three of our party drove over to the Palace, and having returned the call, we had tiffin by ourselves in our ornate octagonal dining-room. Later on an orderly officer called and invited us to the Palace for tennis -a strange "At Home" of turbans and black faces. The Ranee (Princess) Canari was our hostess; formerly a hill girl, she is the Maharajah's "newest" wife, and in coming out of Purdah has of course lost all caste and all respect in the eyes of the unenlightened native. She had had a little; education, spoke French, and wore Parisian gowns. The other wives were strictly Purdah Purdah women; the Maharanee herself had been married to the Maharajah at eleven years old, when he was thirteen. Mohammedans are, of course, polygamists, and they look upon marriages as so many contracts. English women who espouse them in England as civilised men should not ignore the fact that it is the rarest exception to meet with a single unmarried Mohammedan in India, and that complications have before now arisen when a native ruler has returned with a European wife to the land of his birth. That Kapurthalah should treat the Rānee Canari as his companion is a welcome fact; and he told us that he should not allow his eldest son and heir, Ticker, to marry till he was twenty years old, and then to have but one wife. It is the thin edge of civilisation. We were taken to call upon the Maharanee, Ticker's mother, later on a little gipsy, childlike individual of refined appearance, weighed down by gold-embroidered garments, chains, necklets, bracelets, rings, necklaces, forehead star, anklets, and nose-ring. Compared with this daughter of the bluest blood and of a thousand kings, Queen Victoria's own family tree would be but as a thing of yesterday. Is it life which the Maharanee leads-which all Purdah women all over India lead? In the whitewalled homes of kings, or in the reed-roofed hut, lives woman after woman, thousands upon thousands of them, surrounded by fields they may not roam in, above the tumult of the packed bazaar, through nameless horrors of the stifling night, old in grief, and wise in tears, A life which ebbs with none to staunch the failing, A narrow, intolerant religion is at the root of this crying evil, and the only weapon to be employed against it is knowledge. Knowledge will breed scepticism, scepticism will breed tolerance, and tolerance will, with the advance of civilisation, open the door. But knowledge, education, must come first. Before we dined that night, we went to the great Durbar Hall with the Maharajah and his retinue, and were all shod with rinking skates. The floor was "taken" with considerable grace and agility, considering how little we knew about it. It was, to a certain degree, a childish amusement for a ruler of the land; and still more so were the varieties of clockwork toys and expensive French knick-knacks which filled the rooms in the Palace, and were displayed to us that evening when we dined with his Royal Highness. Ranee Canari was excluded from the battery of native eyes round the table. We had a very French meal, of which a pilau gratified the Maharajah, and took, he explained, a whole day to make; music brought the evening to a close, Kapurthalah himself singing "Polly winked his eye," out of The Geisha. We were all looking forward to the next day and to our expedition after pig; and conversation that evening turned, as it always does turn, upon the threadbare comparisons between fox-hunting and pig-sticking. "Fox-hunting! what is it," said F., "but a mob of |