After a tedious and harassing journey of ten days, they reached on the 26th the summit of a lofty mountain, from whence he enjoyed the first glimpse of Kashmere. He now travelled in the suite of a Mohammedan rhan, with whom he had fallen in on the road; and this gentleman being a native of the country, and held everywhere in the highest esteem, he enjoyed the rare privilege of passing the custom-house untaxed and unmolested. He therefore entered with an unsoured temper into the paradise of Hindostan, where the face of nature exhibited all those features whose tendency it is to call up in the mind images of cheerfulness and pleasure. “The road from Vere Nang,” says Forster, “leads through a country exhibiting that store of luxuriant imagery which is produced by a happy disposition of hill, dale, wood, and water; and that these rare excellences of nature might be displayed in their full glory, it was the season of spring, when the trees, the apple, the pear, the peach, the apricot, the cherry, and mulberry, bore a variegated load of blossom. The clusters also of the red and white rose, with an infinite class of flowering shrubs, presented a view so gayly decked, that no extraordinary warmth of imagination was required to fancy that I stood at least on a province of fairy land.” It is in such regions as these, and not in our northern climates, that the month of May is a season of beauty. The plains, dotted with numerous villages, and intersected by small rivers, were already waving with a rich harvest; while every copse and woody knoll gave shelter to innumerable singing-birds, whose notes made the whole atmosphere appear alive with music. Having reached Pamper, our traveller embarked in a boat on the Jylum, and proceeded by water to the city of Serinagur, which, with its houses covered with parterres of beautiful flowers, possesses at a distance a splendid and imposing aspect, answering in some degree to the idea which the historians of the flourishing days of India have given of it. But on entering the streets the illusion is quickly dissipated. Slaves are invariably filthy in their habits, and the people of Kashmere are now the slaves of the Afghans.