We left, therefore, a young man of four-and-twenty, inclined to be shocked at a wine party, we find him again a man of thirty-six and an inveterate toper. Anything and everything is an excuse for the wine-cup. "Looking down from my tent on the valley below, the watch-fires were marvellously beautiful; that must be the reason, I think, why I drank too much wine at dinner that evening." For Babar is still translucently frank. "I was miserably drunk," is an oft confession, and he does not hesitate to record the fact that he and his companions "sate drinking wine on the hill behind the water-run till evening prayers; when we went to Târdi-Beg's house and drank till midnight--it was a wonderfully amusing and guileless party." It was the vice of his age. He had resisted it apparently until he was six-and-twenty, and he had every intention of giving it up at a stated time, for he writes in 1521: "As I intended to abstain from wine at the age of forty, and as I now wanted somewhat less than a year of that age, I therefore drank copiously." One thing may be said in his favour: he never let wine interfere with his activities, either of body or of mind. He was ready, as ever, to detail the flowers he saw in his marches, to expatiate on a beautiful view, to turn a _ghazel_ or quatrain, to rise ere dawn, to spend arduous days in the saddle or on foot. The portraits of him belong to this period, and they show us a man tall, strong, sinewy, with the long straight nose of his race, a broad brow, arched eyes, and a curiously small, sensitive mouth. Such was the man who conquered India, and in the beginning of his conquests set Timur before himself as an example to such purpose that it is hard to believe that the ardent and bloodthirsty Mahomedan of his first campaign is our sunny, genial Babar. In fact the taking of Bajâur is sad reading. "The people," writes Babar, "had never seen matchlocks, and at first were not in the least afraid of them, but, hearing the reports of the shots, stood opposite the guns, mocking and playing unseemly antics." By nightfall, however, they had learnt fear, and "not a man ventured to show his head." This was, nevertheless, not the first time that we hear of guns and matchlocks in Indian warfare, although it is the first absolutely authentic mention of them. But a hundred and fifty years before this, Mahomed-Shâh Bhâmani, King of Guzerât, is said to have employed them. As a digression, it may be observed that Babar's Memoirs give us an interesting account of the casting of a big gun by one Ustâd-Ali, "who was like to cast himself into the molten metal" when the flow of it ceased ere the mould was full! Babar, however, "cheered him up, gave him a robe of honour," and "succeeded in softening his humiliation." Which, by the way, was unnecessary, since when the mould was opened the mischief was found to be reparable, and the gun, when finished, threw over 1,600 yards.