Now Jeypore from the Anglo-Indian point of view is a station on the Rajputana-Malwa line, on the way to Bombay, where half an hour is allowed for dinner, and where there ought to be more protection from the sun than at present exists. Some few, more learned than the rest, know that garnets come from Jeypore, and here the limits of our wisdom are set. We do not, to quote the Calcutta shopkeeper, come out “for the good of our ’ealth,” and what touring we accomplish is for the most part off the line of rail. For these reasons, and because he wished to study our winter birds of passage, one of the few thousand Englishmen in India, on a date and in a place which have no concern with the story, sacrificed all his self-respect and became--at enormous personal inconvenience--a Globe-Trotter going to Jeypore, and leaving behind him for a little while all that old and well-known life in which Commissioners and Deputy Commissioners, Governors and Lieutenant-Governors, Aides-de-Camp, Colonels and their wives, Majors, Captains and Subalterns after their kind move and rule and govern and squabble and fight and sell each other’s horses, and tell wicked stories of their neighbours. But before he had fully settled into his part or accustomed himself to saying “Please take out this luggage” to the coolies at the stations, he saw from the train the Taj wrapped in the mists of the morning. There is a story of a Frenchman “who feared not God, nor regarded man,” sailing to Egypt for the express purpose of scoffing at the Pyramids and--though this is hard to believe--at the great Napoleon who had warred under their shadow! It is on record that that blasphemous Gaul came to the Great Pyramid and wept through mingled reverence and contrition, for he sprang from an emotional race. To understand his feelings, it is necessary to have read a great deal too much about the Taj, its design and proportions, to have seen execrable pictures of it at the Simla Fine Arts Exhibition, to have had its praises sung by superior and travelled friends till the brain loathed the repetition of the word, and then, sulky with want of sleep, heavy-eyed, unwashen and chilled, to come upon it suddenly. Under these circumstances everything you will concede, is in favour of a cold, critical and not too impartial verdict. As the Englishman leaned out of the carriage he saw first an opal-tinted cloud on the horizon, and later certain towers. The masts lay on the ground, so that the splendour seemed to be floating free of the earth; and the mists rose in the background, so that at no time could everything be seen clearly. Then as the train sped forward, and the mists shifted and the sun shone upon the mists, the Taj took a hundred new shapes, each perfect and each beyond description. It was the Ivory Gate through which all good dreams come; it was the realization of the “glimmering halls of dawn” that Tennyson sings of; it was veritably