In the Palace-gardens there is even a greater stillness than that about the courts, and here nothing of the West, unless a hypercritical soul might take exception to the lamp-posts. At the extreme end lies a lake-like tank swarming with _muggers_. It is reached through an opening under a block of zenana buildings. Remembering that all beasts by the palaces of Kings or the temples of priests in this country would answer to the name of “Brother,” the Englishman cried with the voice of faith across the water, in a key as near as might be to the melodious howl of the “monkey faquir” on the top of Jakko. And the mysterious freemasonry did not fail. At the far end of the tank rose a ripple that grew and grew and grew like a thing in a nightmare, and became presently an aged _mugger_. As he neared the shore, there emerged, the green slime thick upon his eyelids, another beast, and the two together snapped at a cigar-butt--the only reward for their courtesy. Then, disgusted, they sank stern first with a gentle sigh. Now a _mugger’s_ sigh is the most suggestive sound in animal speech. It suggested first the zenana buildings overhead, the walled passes through the purple hills beyond, a horse that might clatter through the passes till he reached the Man Sagar Lake below the passes, and a boat that might row across the Man Sagar till it nosed the wall of the Palace-tank and then--then uprose the _mugger_ with the filth upon his forehead and winked one horny eyelid--in truth he did!--and so supplied a fitting end to a foolish fiction of old days and things that might have been. But it must be unpleasant to live in a house whose base is washed by such a tank. And so back as Pepys says, through the chu-named courts, and among the gentle sloping paths between the orange trees, up to an entrance of the Palace guarded by two rusty brown dogs from Kabul, each big as a man, and each requiring a man’s charpoy to sleep upon. Very gay was the front of the Palace, very brilliant were the glimpses of the damask-couched, gilded rooms within, and very, very civilised were the lamp-posts with Ram Singh’s monogram, devised to look like V. R., at the bottom, and a coronet, as hath been shown, at the top. An unseen brass band among the orange-bushes struck up the overture of the _Bronze Horse_. Those who know the music will see at once that that was the only tune which exactly and perfectly fitted the scene and its surroundings. It was a coincidence and a revelation. In his time and when he was not fighting, Jey Singh the Second, who built the city, was a great astronomer--a royal Omar Khayyam, for he, like the tent-maker of Nishapur, reformed a calendar, and strove to wring their mysteries from the stars with instruments worthy of a King. But in the end he wrote that the goodness of the Almighty was above everything, and died; leaving his observatory to decay without the Palace-grounds.