A wretched Hindoo Kulassy, or tent-pitcher--just such a creature as one may see shivering in the Strand, singing in a nasal monotone to the beating of his dusky fingers on a tom-tom--cried something in mockery after them--a sign of the times--but they heard him not. The Shah Bagh, amid the luxuriant shrubberies of which the voices of the dove and nightingale were heard at certain seasons; the quaint, old musjeed, where Waller was on guard; the village of Behmaru; a pile of stones marking where an English lady had been thrown out of her palanquin and murdered by some wild Belooches, who fled, leaving her unplundered, as they deem the blood of a woman bodes disaster to those who shed it, were each and all soon left behind, and they drew near the long and narrow lake of Istaliff, which is about four miles in length, and where Sinclair's boat lay now neglected among the weeds and sedges. The vicinity of this lake, the only one in Afghanistan, was lonely, and the hills of Behmaru bordered it on the east. There the shaggy goat, bearded like his Afghan master, and the graceful little antelope leaped from rock to rock; there the long-haired cat and the jabbering ape sprang from branch to branch of the plane and poplar trees, and the beautiful little bird known as the Greek partridge, the hill-chuckore of the natives, whirred up from among the long grass; but save these, and once when a solitary Afghan shepherd peeped forth from his tent of coarse black camlet, pitched on the green mountain slope, there seemed no living thing on their now sequestered path. Waller, Burgoyne, and others, were older and more showy officers than Denzil, as yet; but it pleased the caprice of Rose Trecarrel to attach him for a time, if not hopelessly, to the train of her admirers; though there was a double risk in the little expedition of that day--the exciting comment among her friends, and the more perilous and equally probable advent of some plundering natives or armed fanatics; yet, heedless of all, the rash girl drove on, looking laughingly back from time to time, with her bright smiling face and alluring eyes, at the lover who sat behind her, striving to speak on passing objects or common-place events, while his soul was full of her, and her only. Fortunately, no deadly or perilous adventure marked that day's expedition; yet Denzil was fated never to forget it. Rose certainly was fond of Denzil; but her love affair had, to her, much of the phase of amusement in it. In him, it was mingled with intense and delicate respect; and every fibre seemed to thrill, when she turned half round and showed her face so beautiful in its animation, while, blown back by the soft breeze and their progress against it, her veil, and sometimes one loose tress of her silky, auburn hair, were swept across his mouth and eyes.