If any part of a land strewn with dead men’s bones have a special claim to distinction, Rajputana, as the cockpit of India, stands first. East of Suez men do not build towers on the tops of hills for the sake of the view, nor do they stripe the mountain sides with bastioned stone walls to keep in cattle. Since the beginning of time, if we are to credit the legends, there was fighting--heroic fighting--at the foot of the Aravalis, and beyond in the great deserts of sand penned by those kindly mountains from spreading over the heart of India. The “Thirty-six Royal Races” fought as royal races know how to do, Chohan with Rahtor, brother against brother, son against father. Later--but excerpts from the tangled tale of force, fraud, cunning, desperate love and more desperate revenge, crime worthy of demons and virtues fit for gods, may be found, by all who care to look, in the book of the man who loved the Rajputs and gave a life’s labours in their behalf. From Delhi to Abu, and from the Indus to the Chambul, each yard of ground has witnessed slaughter, pillage and rapine. But, to-day, the capital of the State, that Dhola Rae, son of Soora Singh, hacked out more than nine hundred years ago with the sword from some weaker ruler’s realm, is lighted with gas, and possesses many striking and English peculiarities which will be shown in their proper place. Dhola Rae was killed in due time, and for nine hundred years Jeypore, torn by the intrigues of unruly princes and princelings, fought Asiatically. When and how Jeypore became a feudatory of British power, and in what manner we put a slur upon Rajput honour--punctilious as the honour of the Pathan--are matters of which the Globe-Trotter knows more than we do. He “reads up"--to quote his own words--a city before he comes to us, and, straightway going to another city, forgets, or, worse still, mixes what he has learnt--so that in the end he writes down the Rajput a Mahratta, says that Lahore is in the North-West Provinces and was once the capital of Sivaji, and piteously demands a “guide-book on all India, a thing that you can carry in your trunk y’know--that gives you plain descriptions of things without mixing you up.” Here is a chance for a writer of discrimination and void of conscience!