the tombs of their saints, as I saw them at that of Kutb Shah in old Delhi, on the Basant, a Hindoo festival.  ‘It only shows,’ said they ’that the end of the world is approaching.  Are we not divided into seventy-two sects among ourselves, all falling off into Hinduism, and every day committing greater and greater follies?  These are the manifest signs long ago pointed out by wise and holy men as indicating the approach of the last day.’[33]

A man might make a curious book out of the indications of the end of the world according to the notions of different people or different individuals.  The Hindoos have had many different worlds or ages; and the change from the good to the bad, or the golden to the iron age, is considered to have been indicated by a thousand curious incidents.[34] I one day asked an old Hindoo priest, a very worthy man, what made the five heroes of the Mahabharata, the demigod brothers of Indian story, leave the plains and bury themselves no one knew where, in the eternal snows of the Himalaya mountains.  ’Why, sir,’ said he, ’there is no question about that.  Yudhisthira, the eldest, who reigned quietly at Delhi after the long war, one day sat down to dinner with his four brothers and their single wife, Draupadi; for you know, sir, they had only one among them all.  The king said grace and the covers were removed, when, to their utter consternation, a full-grown fly was seen seated upon the dish of rice that stood before his majesty.  Yudhisthira rose in consternation.  ‘When flies begin to blow upon men’s dinners,’ said his majesty, ’you may be sure, my brothers, that the end of the world is near—­the golden age is gone—­the iron one has commenced, and we must all be off; the plains of India are no longer a fit abode for gentlemen.’  Without taking one morsel of food,’ added the priest, ’they set out, and were never after seen or heard of.  They were, however, traced by manifest supernatural signs up through the valley of the Ganges to the snow tops of the Himalaya, in which they no doubt left their mortal coils.’  They seem to feel a singular attachment for the birthplace of their great progenitrix, for no place in the world is, I suppose, more infested by them than Delhi, at present; and there a dish of rice without a fly would, in the iron, be as rare a thing as a dish with one in the golden, age.

Muhammadans in India sigh for the restoration of the old Muhammadan regime, not from any particular attachment to the descendants of Timur, but with precisely the same feelings that Whigs and Tories sigh for the return to power of their respective parties in England; it would give them all the offices in a country where office is everything.  Among them, as among ourselves, every man is disposed to rate his own abilities highly, and to have a good deal of confidence in his own good luck; and all think that if the field were once opened to them by such a change, they should very soon be able to find good places for themselves and their