Owing to the Durbar, dinner was served at a late hour in the State dining-room, a spacious apartment in white and gold. At one end hung full-length portraits of our host and hostess in the gorgeous robes they wore at the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in the celebrations in London. Table and sideboard shone with massive silver cups won at race-meetings and shows by the horses of the Cooch Behar stable. Native servants in scarlet and gold waited on the guests; but with all the luxury of a banquet served on silver there was no formality about the meal. The Maharajah and his sons had changed their magnificent attire for a comfortable native dress; and listening to their conversation in colloquial English on polo, shooting, and London theatrical gossip it was hard to realise that an hour before they had been playing their picturesque parts in such a stately Oriental pageant. All the family generally used English as their speech. The boys had been educated at Eton; and Victor, in addition, had done a course at an American University. After dinner we adjourned to the Durbar Hall again to witness from the galleries a _nautch_; and real Indian dancing is a spectacle of which the European soon has his fill. And somewhere about three o'clock in the morning, fatigued with the monotonous chant and the lazily moving fat figures of the _nautch_ girls, overpowered by the heated atmosphere heavy with scent, I gladly hailed the suggestion of Prince Rajendra to escape from it all and go for a mad rush in his motor-car through the surrounding country in the brilliant moonlight. His brothers followed us in their cars. _Nautches_ and motor-cars, the brilliant spectacle of the Durbar and these Eton-bred Indian Princes; what a fantastic medley it all seemed! And the swift sweep through the park in the cool morning air back to an Indian palace and a guest-chamber fitted like the best bedroom in a European _hôtel de luxe_. But when next day I left, in response to an urgent message bidding me come to shoot a tiger near Buxa, even the prospect of the sport scarcely reconciled me to quitting the lavish hospitality of my hosts.