From the Cotton Press the Englishman wandered through the wide streets till he came into a Hindu Temple--rich in marble, stone and inlay, and a deep and tranquil silence, close to the Public Library of the State. The brazen bull was hung with flowers, and men were burning the evening incense before Mahadeo, while those who had prayed their prayer, beat upon the bells hanging from the roof and passed out, secure in the knowledge that the god had heard them. If there be much religion, there is little reverence, as Westerns understand the term, in the services of the gods of the East. A tiny little maiden, child of a monstrously ugly priest with one chalk-white eye, staggered across the marble pavement to the shrine and threw, with a gust of childish laughter, the blossoms she was carrying into the lap of the great Mahadeo himself. Then she made as though she would leap up to the bells and ran away, still laughing, into the shadow of the cells behind the shrine, while her father explained that she was but a baby and that Mahadeo would take no notice. The temple, he said, was specially favored by the Maharaja, and drew from lands an income of twenty thousand rupees a year. Thakoors and great men also gave gifts out of their benevolence; and there was nothing in the wide world to prevent an Englishman from following their example. By this time, for Amber and the Cotton Press had filled the hours, night was falling, and the priests unhooked the swinging jets and began to light up the impassive face of Mahadeo with gas! They used Tændstikker matches. Full night brought the hotel and its curiously-composed human menagerie. There is, if a work-a-day world will give credit, a society entirely outside, and unconnected with, that of the Station--a planet within a planet, where nobody knows anything about the Collector’s wife, the Colonel’s dinner-party, or what was really the matter with the Engineer. It is a curious, an insatiably curious, thing, and its literature is Newman’s _Bradshaw_. Wandering “old arms-sellers” and others live upon it, and so do the garnetmen and the makers of ancient Rajput shields. The world of the innocents abroad is a touching and unsophisticated place, and its very atmosphere urges the Anglo-Indian unconsciously to extravagant mendacity. Can you wonder, then, that a guide of long-standing should in time grow to be an accomplished liar? Into this world sometimes breaks the Anglo-Indian returned from leave, or a fugitive to the sea, and his presence is like that of a well-known landmark in the desert. The old arms-seller knows and avoids him, and he is detested by the jobber of gharis who calls everyone “my lord” in English, and panders to the “glaring race anomaly” by saying that every carriage not under his control is “rotten, my lord, having been used by natives.” One of the privileges of playing at tourist is the brevet-rank of “Lord.” _Hazur_ is not to be compared with it.