turning in the road leading down the hill side, and there, in pre- tending to embrace him, ripped his bowels open with the wagnak [ (l tiger claw”] concealed in his left hand, and stabbed him to the heart with the bichwa {“ scorpion M dagger] hid up his right sleeve. He is the great national hero of the Maratha Hipdus, and his de- scendants are held in the highest reverence throughout the Dakhan.
Every relic of his, his sword, daggers, and seal, and the wagnak or u tiger-daw” with which he foully assassinated Afzul Khan, have all been religiously preserved at Sattara and Kolhapur ever since his death in i6So. Mr. Grant Duff, in his Notes of an Indian Journey , has described the worship of his famous sword, Bhavani, at Sattara. The sword in the Prince's collection is not this deified weapon, but the one that has always been kept, since SivajTs death in 1680, at Kolhapur. The political value of the gift is simply incalculable. It was a family and national heirloom, which nothing but a sentiment of the profoundest loyalty could have moved the descendants of Sivaji to give up, and which has been sacredly guarded for the last 200 years at Kolhapur, as the palladium of their house and race, by the junior branch of the Bhonsla family.
Only less significant are the other gifts of the great sword of Sultan Chand, and the sword of Katabomm Naik. AH these historical weapons, the symbols of the latent hopes and aspi- rations of nations and once sovereign families, were literally forced on the Princess acceptance in a spontaneous transport of loyalty, and their surrender may be fairly interpreted to mean that the people and princes of India are beginning to give up their vain regrets for the past, and, sensible of the present blessings of a civilised rule, desire to centre their hopes of the future in the good faith, and wisdom, and power of the British Government.
The barrel of one of the Prince's matchlocks [Plate 40], damascened in gold, with a sort of poppy pattern, one flower nodding above another along the whole length of the barrel, is the ^noblest example of damascening in the whole collection.
