The royal state umbrella and various gold ornaments were taken as presents for the Queen from the palace, in which the Highlanders were much exercised in their minds to find, framed upon the wall of a room, an engraving of 'Burns and Highland Mary' beside a bird organ, and various old clocks, pots, and kettles; stools wet with the blood of recent human victims, the royal couch garnished with human skulls--and skulls, indeed, adorned most of the rooms, the floors of which were full of graves. In fact, the whole palace, as Mr. Henty wrote, appeared to be little better than a cemetery, though in its cellars were found bottles of brandy, palm wine, and even champagne, which the discoverers thereof were not slow to fully appreciate, and drain off to 'The girls we've left behind us.' At last orders were given that the palace was to be blown up, the whole town reduced to ashes, and a start was to be made for the sea; then the five past days of continued toil and incessant fighting were forgotten, and every heart beat happily and every bronzed face grew bright. On the day the Engineers began to mine the palace, Dalton and Jerry Wilmot paid it a visit, and the latter made very merry about the three thousand three hundred and thirty-three wives of the fugitive king. Unluckily for them both, the former saw a gold _scarabœus_, about the size of a goose-egg, among the many strange ornaments at the head of the king's bed, and with some force contrived to wrench it off, saying to Tony as he did so, 'An article of _bijoutric_ for Laura's boudoir--a souvenir of Coomassie!' The words were hardly out of his mouth when two tall and powerful savages, who had been quietly--if sullenly and resentfully--watching the 'looting' of much royal paraphernalia and rubbish by officers and men, threw themselves upon him with yells, while brandishing long straight daggers that were minus guards or proper hilts, and who wore each at his neck a human jaw, polished clean and white, as a kind of order of valour perhaps. Gesticulating violently, they seemed to demand the surrender of the _scarabœus_, which proved eventually to be a famous fetish--famous even as the skull of the murdered Sir Charles MacCarthy, which the king had carried off with him as the chief palladium of Ashantee. Fortunately Dalton had his sword in his hand, and kept them at bay till they were expelled at the bayonet point by some of the Royal Engineers, but when he and Jerry came forth they were conscious that these two Ashantees with the jaw-bones were watching them and dogging their footsteps, and were menacing them; but anon they slunk away when Dalton put his hand to his revolver case. Then they re-appeared again and again to his great annoyance and irritation. 'This looks ill,' said Jerry; 'it is some state fetish. Throw the confounded thing away. Chuck it at their woolly heads ere worse comes of it.' 'What can come of it?' asked Dalton.