understand your Highness is the first to enjoy among Chiefs of your, Highness’s rank and standing.  And we assure your Highness that for this mark of honour that has been conferred on you by Her Most Gracious Majesty, the Queen-Empress, we feel no less proud than your Highness.  Establishment of commercial factories, schools, hospitals, etc., by your Highness in your State has marked your Highness’s career during these ten years, and we trust that your Highness will be spared to rule over your people with wisdom and foresight, and foster the many reforms that your Highness has been pleased to introduce in your State.  We again offer your Highness our warmest felicitations for the honour that has been conferred on you.  We beg to remain your Highness’s obedient servants.”

Factories, schools, hospitals, reforms.  The prince propagates that kind of things in the modern times, and gets knighthood and guns for it.

After the address the prince responded with snap and brevity; spoke a moment with half a dozen guests in English, and with an official or two in a native tongue; then the garlands were distributed as usual, and the function ended.

CHAPTER XLII.

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others—­his last breath. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

Toward midnight, that night, there was another function.  This was a Hindoo wedding—­no, I think it was a betrothal ceremony.  Always before, we had driven through streets that were multitudinous and tumultuous with picturesque native life, but now there was nothing of that.  We seemed to move through a city of the dead.  There was hardly a suggestion of life in those still and vacant streets.  Even the crows were silent.  But everywhere on the ground lay sleeping natives-hundreds and hundreds.  They lay stretched at full length and tightly wrapped in blankets, beads and all.  Their attitude and their rigidity counterfeited death.  The plague was not in Bombay then, but it is devastating the city now.  The shops are deserted, now, half of the people have fled, and of the remainder the smitten perish by shoals every day.  No doubt the city looks now in the daytime as it looked then at night.  When we had pierced deep into the native quarter and were threading its narrow dim lanes, we had to go carefully, for men were stretched asleep all about and there was hardly room to drive between them.  And every now and then a swarm of rats would scamper across past the horses’ feet in the vague light—­the forbears of the rats that are carrying the plague from house to house in Bombay now.  The shops were but sheds, little booths open to the street; and the goods had been removed, and on the counters families were sleeping, usually with an oil lamp present.  Recurrent dead watches, it looked like.

But at last we turned a corner and saw a great glare of light ahead.  It was the home of the bride, wrapped in a perfect conflagration of illuminations,—­mainly gas-work designs, gotten up specially for the occasion.  Within was abundance of brilliancy—­flames, costumes, colors, decorations, mirrors—­it was another Aladdin show.