own garden. Accompanied by the officer and Mr. Ommanney, we passed through the guard of the Rifles, and entered the room where the Emperor was sitting cross-legged, after the Oriental fashion, on a charpoy, with cushions on each side to lean upon, engaged in eating his dinner, using his fingers only, without knife or fork.
His dress was rich, his vest being cloth of gold, with a beautiful coat of Cashmere, and a turban of the same material. The figure of the old man was slight; his physiognomy very marked; his face small, with a hooked or aquiline nose; his eyes dark and deeply sunk, with something of the hawk aspect about them; his beard was gray and scanty, running down to a point. Notwithstanding his crimes, it was impossible to look upon this descendant of Tamerlane without emotion. My mind went back two hundred and forty years, to the time when England's Embassador humbly sought, in the splendid city of Jehangeer, a foothold for the East India Company. How different the scene before us from what Tavernier saw when he beheld Shah Jehan in that magnificent court, seated on his jeweled “Peacock Throne!” Here was his lineal descendant a prisoner, while two English soldiers, with fixed bayonets, stood guard over him. It recalled the astonished exclamation of a seraph to another potentate in guilt and captivity,
“If thou beest he; but O, how fallen!”
It was just twelve months that very week since I saw the “Princes of Delhi” at the Benares Durbar, in all their pomp and finery, presented in turn to that kingly-looking man, the late Governor Colvin, himself a sacrifice to this rebellion. What one short year had done! Many of those “Princes” were now filling the graves of traitors and murderers, while others of them were awaiting their trial and doom within a minute's walk of where I was standing. This wretched old man was then surrounded with imperial state, and living on his $900,000 per annum; and now, here he was a guilty, forsaken, penniless king—a gazing stock, awaiting his doom. What a change!
