rived there. What were Akbar's outer walls, his treasury, mint, or any lot of ruined stonework to us until we could reach the cold splendors of the dak bangla, once the Record Office and Akbar's House of Dreams, and thaw our fingers over the cook-house charcoals? We shut the mullioned windows in the cliff-like outer walls commanding the vast prospect of the plain, and supplemented the slight and shadowy, the sketchy, impressionist imitation of a breakfast of the Agra hotel with scalding chocolate and really hot toast, and embarked the sympathetic old khansamah on a more solid tiffin than he had contemplated. We proposed to stoke up with all the bodily fuel possible for the return drive in the teeth of the wind.
A troop of guides lay in wait for us, and luck let us have another of those stupid parrots who, in embroidered caps and winding chuddas, mislead one over all the show-places of India. This one stuttered—may all others know and avoid him by that sign!—and, like all of his gild, reversed the guide-book order of sight-seeing. We had already suffered enough in that way, and we ordered him to right about face and march to the Turkish queen's house, first on the Murray list and first object before the Hall of Records. "But, ladyship, I wish f-f-first to sh-sh-show you the mosque and my ancestor's grave." But we wanted none of his ancestors, except in their regular order. "Oh, your ladyship, your ladyship, take me, take me. God is good. Take me, take me," mumbled a toothless collection of wrinkles in white grave-clothes.
