Before proceeding further, it will not be amiss to give the reader some account of this Rajpoot and his daughter. And that he may better understand the personal anecdotes of bravery, honest zeal, and devotedness that distinguished him in life, I must turn to the still broader and deeper historical incidents which are the marked characteristics of the race to which he belonged. I do not undertake to treat of this portion of India at large, but only to look at the small corner of it in which Rama the Rajpoot was born. In the district of Orissa stands on a cluster of hills, in the midst of an arid and undulating plateau, the city of Megara, composed for the most part of houses of mean aspect, with only a few handsome mansions and stately edifices to relieve their monotonous insignificance, possessing few fine trees large enough to afford shade, with the exception of the sacred groves dedicated to the earth-goddess Dâvee and the sun-god Dhupyâ; and with water barely sufficient to quench the excessive thirst of its parched inhabitants, alternately swept by piercing blasts and scorched by intense heats, Megara would certainly present but few attractions to the traveller but for the mysterious reverence which has rested ever since the time of Alexander over the illimitable plains of Hindostan. Tragic and terrible are the memories that poetry has woven about this land of undefined distances and nearly fabulous magnificence, where men adopt, from father to son, the professions of murderers, highwaymen, robbers, soldiers, warriors, and priests, where each man lives as if surrounded by internal and external enemies, and expects from every circling point of the horizon a foeman instead of a friend. From the remotest times there has been a ceaseless march of tribes into this vast peninsula, from which there is no outlet. Pouring across the Indus or straggling down through the passes of the Himalaya, each wave of immigration pushed its predecessors farther into the country. Thus the Aryan nations followed in their turn, at the same time reacting powerfully on the creeds and usages of the primitive people. But various remains of the earlier and rude aboriginal tribes are still found here among the hilly regions and woody fastnesses of the peninsula. Many of them are quite distinct from one another, evidently belonging to different eras of an indefinitely remote and abysmal past.