"Hai!" he screamed as he drove it on to the right spot, the sore part over the left ear. "Hai! Base-born thief, back to your lines!" And the huge bulk of Shere Bahadur turned slowly round and shambled off to the peepul tree like a lamb. "By the trunk of Gunputty! I will make that lad a havildar, and the thousand rupees shall be his," swore the Maharaj. "Pillar of the earth!" advised the Vizier, "let this unworthy one speak. It is Futteh Din, the dead Aladin's son. Give him five rupees, and _let him be mahout_." * * * * * When I last saw Shere Bahadur he was passing solemnly under the old archway of the "Gate of the Hundred Winds" at Kalesar. The Maharaj Adhiraj was seated in the howdah, with his excellency the Nawab Juggun Jung by his side. On the driving-seat was Futteh Din, gorgeous in cloth of gold, and they were on their way to the funeral-pyre of the Heir Apparent, who had died suddenly from a surfeit of cream. As they passed under the archway a sweetmeat-seller rose and bowed to the prince, and Shere Bahadur, stretching out his trunk, helped himself to a pound or so of Turkish Delight. "Such," said the sweetmeat-seller to himself ruefully, as he gazed after the retreating procession, "such are the ways of kings." REGINE'S APE It is a May morning in the north of India--such a morning as comes when the hot wind has been blowing for three weeks, and has shrivelled everything before it, like tea-leaves under the fan of a drying engine. The Grand Trunk Road, a long line of grey dotted in with dust-covered _kikur_ trees, stretches for three hundred miles to the frontier, and to the right and left of it, beginning at the village of the Well of Lehna Singh, which lies but a quoit-cast from the roadside, spreads a plain, dry, arid, and parched--agape with thirst--the seams running along its brown surface like open lips panting for rain, the cool rain which will not come yet, although, at times, the distant rumble of thunder is heard, and dark clouds pile up in the horizon, only to melt away into nothing. The tall _sirpat_ grass has been cut, and its pruned stalks, stiff as the bristles on a hair-brush, extend in regular patches of yellow, spiky scrub, with bands of mottled brown and grey earth between them. Here and again it would seem there are scattered pools, for the eyes, running over the landscape, shrink back from a sudden flash, as of water reflecting the fierce light of the sun. It is not so, however, for, except what the groaning Persian wheels drag up from the deep wells, there is never a drop of water for man, for beast, or for field. Those gleaming stretches from which the pained eyes turn are nothing more than the bare earth, covered with a saline efflorescence, soft and silver white, as if it were dry and powdered foam. It is yet early, and the light is not so dazzling as to prevent the eye resting on the