him on an elephant, despatched him as a State prisoner to Selimgarh, the mid-river fort at Delhi! So ended poor, foolish Morâd's dream of kingship; nor was his life much more prolonged, for shortly afterwards he was executed in prison on a trumped-up charge. Shujah escaped a like fate by disappearance, and poor Dâra, after unheard-of dangers, difficulties, trials and terrors, met with a worse one. But this record belongs to the reign of Aurungzebe, the man without a heart. Shâhjahân, meanwhile, remained for seven years a captive in the fort, old, decrepid, tearful, counting his jewels, and comforted by his daughter, Pâdshâh Begum. A sad ending this, for a man who had been the most magnificent monarch who ever sate upon the throne of India. But all his energies, all his capabilities seem to have deserted him. He made no effort to reassert his kingship, and what is still more strange, no friend or companion, no minister, no adherent, attempted it for him. Utterly deserted by all save his daughter, he died seven years afterwards, in 1665, and was buried at his own request beside his wife in the Tâj Mahal, that most marvellous monument of marriage which the world has ever seen. And out of this there springs to light for the seeing eye a pitiful story which brings back a pulse of human sympathy for the man whose old age was so sordid, so degenerate. How many years was it since with bitter grief he had buried the wife to whom he was so devotedly attached that history declares he kept faithfully to her, and to her only, till death did them part? It was four-and-thirty years since the daughter she was bearing to him cried--so the story runs--ere it was born, and within a few hours, Ârjamund the Beloved lay dead with her still-born babe. A tragedy indeed! Think what it means! Long years of hardship, exile, wandering, and then four only--four short years of content, of kingship, in which to heap comforts, luxuries, on the woman whom you love--who has borne with you the heat and burden of the day. That was Shâhjahân's fate. But the history of these Moghul kings, these Great Moghuls whose name still lingers in conjunction with that of the Grand Turk and Bluebeard as something slightly shocking and decidedly despotic so far as women are concerned, is curiously disconcerting to one's preconceived ideas on this counter. Babar, whose Mahum met him after long years "at midnight," as with bare head and slipper-shoon he ran to catch the earliest glimpse of her along the dusty road. Humâyon, whose sixteen-year-old bride, Hamida, wedded in hot love-haste, brought him his first son at the age of thirty-eight. Akbar, who, after a brief youth of normal passion, settled down into the life of an anchorite. Shâhjahân, who built the Tâj, who spent twenty-two years of his life in gathering together every conceivable beauty to lay at the dead feet of a woman who bore him thirteen children.