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STtiiTi The rdbter agreed , and ho sooner had he gone into the city upon this errand , S L «« nt for a vot canning little old woman . There is now no woman living tZi mASS "SSia was , though '' ^ interpolated the Shekh , with a sly twinkle of the eve— " there are still some , who would be a match for Ebliz himself . Well , this little cunning old woman went to Beer-bul ' s daughter and engaged herself as maid , arid she gradually so won her confidence that Beer-bul ' s daughter showed her the box with three locks and the ruby . So she filched the keys , opened the locks , took the niby , and gave it to the robber , who brought it to Akbar . Then Akbar threw it into the Jumna , and sent for Beer-bul . ' Bring me the ruby , ' said he . ' Very well' said Beer-bul , and went home to bring it , but behold ! it was stolen . Well , Where ' s the ruby ? ' said Akbar . ' Your Majesty shall have it in fifteen days . ' * Very well , ' said Akbar , but remember that your head is security for it . " Beer-bul went home , and said to his daughter , « We have but fifteen days to live let « s spend them in festivity . ' So they ate , and drank , and gave feasts and dances , till in twelve days they had spent many lacs of rupees , and there was not a . pice left them to buy food . They remained thus two days . On the fourteenth morning , the daughter of a fisherman who fished in the Jumna said to her father : ' Father , the i Bajah Beer-bul and his daughter have had nothing to eat for two days ; let me take I them this fish for breakfast . ' So she took them the fish , which Beer-bul ' s daughter I received with many thanks , and immediately cooked . But as they were eating it , I there came a pebble into Beer-bul ' s mouth . He took it out in his fingers , and , wah ! a it was the ruby . The next morning he went to Akbar-Shah , and said : ' Here is the ruby , as I promised . ' Akbar was covered with surprise ; but when he had heard the story , he gave Beer-bul two crores of rupees , and said that he spoke the truth—it was better to rejoice than to grieve in misfortune . " At Delhi and Oude Mr . Taj lor saw—as who could fail to see?—in the one , a humiliating spectacle of decrepitude ; in the other , to use Rymer ' s phrase descriptive of Othello , " a bloody farce . " That the mighty Subah of the Deccan should be ruled by a prince ( under treaties which he has repeatedly and systematically broken ) who preys like a Bourbon upon villages and cities ; or that the people of Oude should be tortured by an idiot who burns thirty or forty villages whenever the taxing season returns , is a reproach to the British Empire . It is to be hoped , at the same time , that when the octogenarian Akbar II ., the impotent representative of the Mogul dynasty , dies , the exhibitions will cease of our Imperial Government paying theatrical homage to a man who is not even permitted to be the tyrant of his own 1 household . For fifty years has he sat on the crystal throne , a piteous image I of imbecility . But the ignominy of his situation is mild compared with that I of the drivelling King of Oude , who , retaining only the powers of domestic oppression , subjects myriads of human beings to the rigours of his malignant idiotcy . Mr . Taylor ' s anecdotes of this phantom court illustrate the worst that has been said of it by Residents and travellers . To extract passages from Mr . Taylor's pictorial description of India would be to cut squares out of a panorama . We will ask the reader to glance , instead , at a prim Chinese interior : — We are curious to inspect the dwelling of a Chinaman of the better class , and our friend , who is fortunately able to assist us , conducts us to the house of a wealthy old merchant . It is a stone building , recently erected , and everything about it indicates great neatness , and an approach to taste in the owner . In the open verandahs are boxes of the mate-tan , or rose-sceht ' ed peony , with gorgeous white and crimson blossoms , and the lan-whei , a water-plant of an orchideous nature , with a long spike of yellowish-green flowers . The viuu-tan also decorates the rooms , which are hung with lanterns of stained glass . The furniture is of wood , of a stiff , uncona- I fortable pattern , but elaborately carved . The owner , an urbane , polite old gentleman , \ regales us with cups of stewed tea , whose delicate aroma compensates for the absence > of milk and sugar , and asks us up stairs into his library . The shelves are covered \ with Chinese works , bound in their wooden covers , and in the centre of the room i stands a bronze frame , with three apertures at the top , and a bundle of arrows . The latter are the implements of a game which the host explains to us , by taking the arrows to the further end of the room , seizing one by the tip of the shaft with his thumb and fore-finger , and throwing it so as to fall into one of the small circular openings of the frame . We try a game , whereof the victory , owing to his more extensive practice , remains with him . ! The following , which refers to the environs of Shanghai , might serve to illustrate the sides of some mighty porcelain jar , only it has a better 'I perspective : — The country is a dead lejrel , watered with sluggish creeks , and intersected -with ; ditches and canals . It is studded far and near with shapeless mounds of earth erected ¦! over obsolete natives ; sparingly dotted with clumps of dark cedar-trees or plantations i of the inestimable bamboo , and enlivened by occasional hamlets , which , shaded with bushy willows , have a pleasant , rural aspect when seen from a distance , but are mostly disgusting when you draw near . The soil is a very rich clayey loam , and yields abundant crops of rice , wheat , sweet potatoes , beets , beans , pea-nuts , and the other staples of Chinese food . Much of it must have been originally marsh land , which has been drained by canals and the gradual rise of the coast , from the deposits of the Yang-tse-Kiang . " The paths from village to village are on narrow dykes , winding between the fields , and crossing the ditches by bridges formed of single largo slabs of granite , -which are brought down from the hills . Occasionally you see a highway , six or eight feet broad , paved with blocks of stone , laid transversely , but I doubt whether a carriage could go in any direction further than two or three miles from the city . I sometimes mot a Chinaman of tho bettor class mounted on a sturdy little pony , and onco encountered a traveller from Soo-Chow in tho national conveyance of China—tho wheelbarrow ! Ho was seated sideways , with his legs dangling below , while his baggage , placed on the opposite side , served to trim tho vehicle . It wns a one-horse wheelbarrow , propollod by a stout coolie , with a strap over his shoulders , and made a doleful croaking as it passed . Accompanying tho American mission to Japan , Mr . Taylor paid a visit to tho Loo-Uhoo lslos . In this group , as in the island of Java , vast natural amphitheatres are terraced with rice-fields , lawns , and villages , ns near to tho ideal—in a distant view—as tho valley of Husseins . At tho Loo-Choo capital works in sculpture were- observed , especially at tho " viceroy ' s" palace , " the Elegant Enclosure of Fragrant leativities . " Thonco passing to the Jupunese coast , Mr . Bayard Taylor had some experience of Ja- pancso affectation and jealousy . It is probably on account of tho rule in tho American navy , that all journals kept by officers ( our traveller was an officer pro tern . ' ) should bo surrendered to Government , that this part of tho book is loss animated than the rest . We will wait for Commodore Perry ' s narrative , and return westwards through tho Indian seas : — From dawn until dark wo wont slowly loitering past the lovely islands that gotn
those remote seas , " until the last of them sank astern in the flush of sunset . Nothing can be more beautiful than their cones of never-fading verdure , draped to the very edge of the waves , except where some retreating cove shows its beach of snow-white sands . On the larger ones are woody valleys , folded between the hills , arid opening upon long slopes , overgrown with the cocoa-palm , the mango , and many a strange and beautiful tree of the tropics . The light , lazy clouds , suffused with a crimson flush of heat , that floated slowly through the upper heavens , cast shifting shadows upon the masses of foliage , and deepened , here and there , the dark-purple hue of the sea . Retreating behind one another until they grew dim and soft as clouds on the horizon , and girdled by the most tranquil of oceans , these islands were real embodiments of the joyous fancy of Tennyson , in his dream of the Indies , in " Locksley Hall . " Here , although the trader comes , and the flags of the nations of far continents sometimes droop in the motionless air—here are still the heavy-blossomed bowers and the heavy-fruited trees , the summer isles of Eden in their purple spheres of sea . The breeze fell nearly to a calm at noonday , but our vessel still moved noiselessly southward , and island after island faded from green to violet , and from violet to the dim , pale blue that finally blends with the air . This narrative is bright in style , and in matter at once varied and entertaining .
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. . < , ^ < i -, ^ < < £ J J * * c a s s p j £ ' t 1 t ^ . p * p p t g . T y ; n t j Q ti v c I « o ti t < r | h \ t 1 LEWIS'S RIVERS . An Account of the Rivers of England and Woks . By Samuel Lewis , Jun ., Author of " The History and Topography of the Parish of St . Mary , Islington . " Longman and Co . A . book full of suggestive matters , and yet disappointing . " The dripping of other men ' s wit , " as Margaret of Newcastle said of this sort of thing , unless cemented together by a mind sympathetic with the subject , is at the best uneven reading . Carlyle says we are all poets when we read a poem well ; but by that rule a compiler , if he understand his work , ought to be equal to his authorities . Now , the English rivers , without a pun , are a fertile source—almost too fertile . Thej are perplexing from their number : while many of them , though of tiniest dimensions , have some importance from the lands through which they run , and the uses they serve . A dictionary of English rivers , therefore , is a good idea ; it is one of the desirable companions to the newspapers , and to the railway guide , for the traveller , and the commercial traveller . Mr . Lewis has still left the work a desideratum . We have a thick post octavo volume , with a vast number of streams alphabetically noted ; but the description of each fails for most things that would be sought in such a dictionary . The author gives you a description of the stream , its source , the towns it passes , its scenery , its junction with the sea or some other stream—in short , such description of the stream as might be given by a guide from a mountain-top or a balloon ; but no account of the river . The breadth is given only at rare intervals ; the depth seldom ; the soil through which the stream passes hardly ever , and , only in the rapidest terms ; the nature of the trade , the size , population , and character of the towns , are mostly omitted , or touched in phrases so slight , as to be worth nothing . It is much if you get the length of the stream , its breadth here and there , and the names of the towns which it passes . In short , it is the description of the rivers by a painter—without a powerful command-of descriptive language . Yes , there is one particular often noted—the description of fish to be found . Mr . Lewis ' s sources of information are of very various worth ; they are given at the end of every article , so that the reader may modify his opinion of a description according to his estimate of the books consulted . Yet even imperfectly treated the subject is fertile—even without the practical and commercial there was much to tell—much more than Mr . Lewi 3 has told . There is hardly a stream in England which has not its bright particular poet . Every bank is haunted by a sentiment , and images ot beauty in themselves lovely are heightened and increased by their genius locL Perhaps every one has experienced a feeling of unrest in looking at running water ; and if the heart were not so secret in its workings , if _ the mirror were not so transitory in its reflexions , water , with its mysterious influence , might let one into the marrow of many a man ' s history . Wordsworth writes of the " power of waters over the minds of poets ; " Shelley evidently had an immense sympathy with the crystal element , with its beauty , its change , its powei * . But for this sympathy we should never have had that perfect but desperately mournful complaint of his written near Naples ; and on referring to the stanzas , we see Shelley must have been affected by the unrest wo have spoken of : — The lightning of tho noontide ocean Is flashing round mo , and a tone Arises from , its measured motion : How sweet did any heart now share in my emotion . Poets with nerves less stretched than Shelley ' s have become , as it were , wedded to the waters of their home . Wordsworth , Southoy , and Coleridge , inspired by the scenery amid which tliey thought , earned for themselves the title of " Lake poets . " Tho Duddon , a mountainous stream on the confines of Westmoreland , Cumberland , and Lancashire , furnished Wordsworth with subjects for thirty-three sonnets , clear and stately as the spotless flood which inspired them . The Rotha , another river in tho Lake district , seemed to vie with " long-loved Duddon" in exciting the untircd exuberance of tho virtuous poet : ho composed thousands of versea beside ) it , many of thorn commemorating the lake , the valley , and the surrounding scenery . Hartley Coleridge , the unhappy man whom some one has described as " wandering like a breeze , " ended his troubled life in a cottage on tho banks of tho Itotfin . Yet Mr . Lewis , for nil his exclusive attention to tho picturesque , shirks the duty of describing tho beauties of this river ; appending to his notice , by way of apology , that it is " impossible in ¦«¦ I «« tte « i sjmwso-Tho plea reminds one of the young la < lv who excused herself from repeating her lesson because she knew it too well . i / -. \ . i , rt White and The " rippling Trent" is tho well-beloved river of K » f ° J *'"'« » ftn < J Wilford , a Ullage on its right bank , was his ™\^ . " ? * £ ™ tnd tho to which he forSed , tho hut where ho drowned with Jna oyes open , ana ttto
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QotopE * $ , 18 S 5 Q THE L E A D E R . 965
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Leader (1850-1860), Oct. 6, 1855, page 965, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse2.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2109/page/17/
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