admirably catalogued, so minutely classified, so carefully numbered from one to several thousands in red, blue, and green tickets, and so marked with distinguishing letters from A to Z in caps., small pica and italics, that, in addition to its merits as an Exhibition, it had all the charm of an elaborate puzzle.
By way of improving the native taste the most brilliant examples of British textile fabrics were shown. Hearth-rugs from Halifax, on which white ponies, red roses, and brown retrievers were pictured in wool with more than pre-Raphaelite fidelity; machine-made lace curtains from Nottingham, worked with elephants, tigers and the Royal Arms of England as a special artistic novelty; calico-prints from Manchester blazing with all the colours of the rainbow, "in one red ruin blent;" "merinoes, alpacas and cashmeres from Bedford iridescent with every possible shade of mauve, magenta, and all the baleful splendours of the aniline series of dyes, were only a few of the glories of this department. Hardware was no less fully represented.
A fender and set of fire-irons in ormolu and polished steel from Sheffield so fascinated the Nawab of Bewaqufabad, that he insisted on buying and carrying them away on the spot; and straightway thrust the poker into his cummerbund among his jewelled pistols and jade sword-hilts, satisfied that he had acquired a lethal weapon of great beauty and unknown powers; while the leaders of his suite proudly shouldered the tongs and fire-shovel. Out of doors were beautiful ploughs and harrows, all shining steel, polished wood and cunning wheels. There were clod-crushers, sub-soil ploughs and seed drills from Beverly and Bedford, whose weight, complicated construction, and superb finish filled the minds of the native cultivators with awe at the unfathomable mystery of insanity of the English, who drew the heavens and the earth together to compass such simple acts as ploughing and sowing. But, as the mamlutdárs and tahsíldárs had explained in a quiet way to the native gentry that the sure way to the good graces of the burra sahibs was to affect an interest in these wondrous mechanisms and to buy them, there was brisk competition for such things as sugar-cane mills—each costing as much as a year's produce of any two talúqas, and requiring a score of bullocks or a steam-engine to work them, Atmospheric churns on the newest hydrostatic principles with elliptic plungers and eccentric motions, worth several herds of kine, were no
