The topographically inclined among biblical commentators might select a great many more unlikely spots for the Garden of Eden than Kashmir. The four rivers are there—the Indus, the Jhelam, the Chenab and the Ravi. Their banks present the widest possible variety of rock, soil, vegetation and animal life. The palm and pomegranate are at home in the valleys, and the dwarf willow and birch are frozen out a long way below the summits of the mountains. The tiger and the ptarmigan are, measured vertically, close neighbors, a mile or two apart, within easy calling distance. Man is equally multiform. All his races are assembled save the African. His extremes in physiognomy, dress, government and religion are brought into close communion. Character, in this cosmopolitan district, gives place to eclecticism. Its features and its occupants represent the whole world, and might readily refurnish it were all the rest of its surface laid desolate.

Curiously enough, the idea of a garden has always associated itself with Kashmir. Eastern poets and historians speak of it as a garden collectively, and lavish their most brilliant powers of description on the gardens which make it up in detail—the gardens of the terraced hills, the gardens of the broad alluvial plain, and the floating gardens of the lakes Wúlar and Dal. These last, more fortunate than those of Babylon and Nineveh, have maintained their existence to our day, the aquatic cultivator rowing among his parterres and gathering his melons over the gunwale. Fertility has never failed. The permanence in beauty and productiveness designed for Eden has here been sustained by the harmoniously-acting forces of Nature, and Adam might, for all that the explorers tell us to the contrary, have lived in Kashmir after his primitive fashion till now. He would, however, have been compelled in some degree to modify his taste in regard to clothing, unless he confined himself the year through to the valley, ninety miles by twenty, which strictly bears the name. A winter suit would have been indispensable to his excursions among the bordering mountains, which swell from an elevation of ten thousand feet above tide to twenty-two, and even, on the extreme limits of the region now officially named Kashmir, to twenty-eight thousand. As to antiquity, time is, like everything else, on a grand scale in Kashmir. Her earliest dynasty, the Pandu, runs far into the life of the first father, having come to an end twenty-five hundred years before Christ, after a duration of thirteen hundred years, if we are to believe Baron Hügel, an archæologist of the good old German type, who is daunted by no figures, and who simply "reminds the reader," as he would of what he had for dinner yesterday, of the stunning chronology here cited. To the epoch of that primeval dynasty the baron assigns the building of the great temple of Mártand, the ruins of which delight all travellers and excite to the use of such epithets as "wonderful" and "glorious" the impassive Wilson. He declares that they are quite superior to anything architectural around them, and "might yet vie with the finest remains of Greek and Roman architecture." The temple stands solitary on a stretch of table-land four hundred feet above the valley and ten leagues east of the capital. Tradition avers, partly on the strength of several ancient beaches still distinctly marked, that the whole valley was under water when the temple was built, and that it originally stood upon the immediate shore. This generally unreliable guide even goes into details and grows statistical, mentioning the year 266 b.c. as the epoch of the sudden shrinking of the waters to what—or nearly what, for desiccation is said to be still going on—is seen of them now. This becomes less incredible in the light of the extraordinary oscillations of level in the streams and lakes with which the present inhabitants are familiar. In 1858 the Indus rose, at a point below its exit from the mountains, one hundred and sixty feet in twenty-four hours, its rise in the narrow defiles above having been of course greater. A single pool, temporarily formed on the slopes of the mighty Nanga Parbat by the melting of the snow in 1850, was a mile and a half long by half a mile wide and three hundred feet deep—just so much devastation "cocked and primed."

The modern state of Kashmir dates from 1846, when the Sikh empire, of which it was a part, was overthrown by the British. Golab Singh, who had made himself useful to the Indian government, was placed over it as maharajah, with a show of independence, but real subordination. He fixed his capital at Jummoo, in the extreme south of his dominions and within easy reach of Lahore. The name Jummoo is given by the natives to his whole territory, although the province of that name is, so far as geographical extent goes, a mere fragment of it. The provinces of Jummoo and Kashmir, immediately north of it, comprise together about a third of the aggregate of sixty-eight thousand square miles. Their share of the population is infinitely greater in proportion. Out of a total, in 1873, of 1,534,972 souls, the province of Jummoo contained 861,075—44,000 of them in the city of that name, the political metropolis. The government of Kashmir had 491,846, including 136,000 in the city of Srinagar. The district of Punch, which boasts a rajah of its own, tributary to the maharajah, had 77,566, and the outlying governments, as they are termed, of Gilgit in the extreme north-east, Baltistán in the north, and Ladákh, or Little Tibet, in the east, 104,485 together. In the province of Kashmir the Mohammedans are in the large majority of six to one. In that of Jummoo, on the contrary, the excess is slightly in favor of the Hindús—a circumstance which accounts for the sovereign's choice of a capital, he being a Hindú and showing in his political acts a preference for his co-religionists and a corresponding distrust of his Moslem subjects. In Ladákh, Búdha is supreme, his worshippers numbering 20,254 to 260 followers of Islam and 107 adherents of the Vedas—hardly one to the square mile of all religions.

The different creeds get on very comfortably side by side, the mosque and the idol temple decorating the same street, and the praying-machines of the Lámas grinding out perpetual bliss without let or hinderance from those who believe in another way of reaching the ear of the Unknowable. This Utopian scene of universal toleration has not failed to attract the representatives of our own faith. The Moravians have long had an establishment on the south-eastern mountains, and we read of the conversion of the descendants of the last rajah of Kishtwár by an American missionary—of what sect is not stated.

Generally speaking, the lines of race coincide but vaguely with those of creed. The Hindús and Mohammedans are both of Aryan race, and Mohammedan converts are found among the Mongolian—or rather Turanian—worshippers of Búdh. The latter process would have made more headway but for the influence of the reigning dynasty, which discourages it on system. The change implied in this proselytism is greater in respect of some social practices than in the abstract principles of religious belief. The polyandry of the Tibetans is in direct contrast with the polygamy of the Moslems, and is far more strictly maintained. It is favored by the circumstance that, contrary to what usually obtains in old countries, the males in this region considerably outnumber the females; yet, while that disproportion exists throughout the provinces, polyandry is confined to the Tibetans. Their wretched lands, verging on the line of perpetual snow, devoid of fuel, and in many places unable to ripen grain, keep them poor; and they assign as a justification for the practice the necessity of repressing population and retaining property undivided. One mistress of the house and three or four masters, who are almost always brothers, is their unique remedy for the hardships of their lot, so lowly and yet (topographically) so elevated. Among their Mohammedan and Hindú compatriots the "twin barbarism" of a plurality of wives appears to be confined in practice to a few of the powerful and wealthy. Until within the last few years its repulsive features were wont to be brought into more hideous relief by the cruel custom of suttee, or widow-burning. It is only within half a generation past that British interference has succeeded in putting a stop to these horrible immolations. When, in 1843, Suchet Singh, uncle of the present maharajah, Ranbir Singh, died, his home harem of a hundred and fifty wives were burned with his body at Ramnagar, and the same execution was inflicted on his branch establishment of twenty-five at Jummoo. Seven years after the beginning of British sway the thirty-two widows of a cousin of the maharajah were burned. This scene was witnessed by Mr. Drew, an English engineer of eminence who was for ten years employed in surveying and exploring the new state, and from whose narrative many of the facts given in this article are drawn. Upon another occasion he saw the forcible sacrifice of a single widow. The poor woman, shrieking fearfully, sprang from the funeral pile as the flames surrounded her, but was instantly seized and thrown back into it by the "scandalized" priests.

The guide-book and the locomotive have marked this romantic land for their own, but their progress is far from complete. The advance of the latter, indeed, has probably reached its limit, some twenty leagues outside the extreme south-western corner. The former is still fain to depend largely on Bernier, the Frenchman who visited Kashmir two centuries ago in the train of the Mogul emperor Aurengzebe. Bernier kept his eyes open, and left not only a good account of the manners and life of the Great Mogul and his court, but a fair itinerary. His description of Srinagar and its vicinity still holds good, and modern books point us to the pass of the Pir Panjal so disastrous to the imperial ladies. The foremost of fifteen elephants, each carrying four women, took fright in a narrow part of the so-called road and backed the rest over a precipice. Only three or four of the odalisques were killed by the fall, but not one elephant was saved. Bernier passed the scene of the accident two days after, and saw some of the animals still alive, but able only to trumpet mournfully for assistance.

North of Jummoo the highest type of road accommodates no longer an elephant, but at most a hill-pony. In the vale of Srinagar the chief thoroughfares are sluggish rivers, lakes and canals, navigated by a remarkably sturdy race of boatmen. The chief line of traffic to that valley, the heart of Kashmir proper, from Jummoo, is hardly practicable for horses. In its length of a hundred and seventy-seven miles it crosses two ridges, each nine thousand feet above the sea, with a hollow between five thousand feet deep. The starting-point, or southern end of the path, is fifteen hundred feet above tide, and the valley of Srinagar from fifty-two hundred to sixty-five hundred. These are all trifling elevations compared to those of the Himáliya on the south-east and the Karakoram chain, to which England has pushed the maharajah's boundary, on the north; but they will do very well for Western tourists to "cut their teeth on," especially as they are interspersed with minor hills of every grade of height and surface. The varied assortment of climates also supports the idea of a general training-ground for travellers. Bernier thought the first summit he crossed, coming from the south, "the dreadful rim of the world," but the descent of it plumped him, "as if by enchantment, into the centre of France." In sheltered places with a southern exposure the tropics reappear, but the vegetation of the foothills and middle mountains is said to be, but for the deodara cedar (Pinus excelsa) and a few other trees, European in character. The resemblance of the undergrowth is less marked, and still less that of the inhabitants, the costume of the mountaineers, notably the tribe named Gaddis, reasserting Asia. These Oriental Swiss are as hardy as their Western analogues, thanks to a continual struggle for existence against Nature and a tolerably frequent one against man. Against the latter foe they are at present guaranteed by the quiet of English rule, but the avalanche and the torrent remain unquelled.

The famous vale is an emerald with a rough setting—a jewel always much sought after, and which would have been carried away long ago had it been portable. But its mightiest and most fortunate possessors were fain to come to it by a long and painful path over crags and snows, and to pass away, one after the other, and leave it in undimmed brightness, clasped tightly as ever in its frame of rocks. At the beginning of the fourteenth century its ruler was a Hindú rani, who stabbed herself rather than marry her traitorous and usurping vizier. Then came the sway of a Moslem dynasty, two of whose members stand out prominently by reason of opposite traits. One earned the name of the Image-breaker by his wanton destruction of the ancient architecture and sculpture. The balance oscillated toward the good when, in the fifteenth century, Zein-ul-Abdin introduced the Tibetan goat and the weavers of Turkestan, and originated the manufacture of the famous shawls. In 1588 the country was surrendered to the emperor Akbar, who, with the most noted of his descendants, Jehángír, Shah Jehán and Aurengzebe, made it their favorite summer-retreat and lavished upon it an expenditure the fruits of which are yet conspicuous. The Afghans, from beyond the north-west mountains, seized it in 1752, and were dispossessed by Ranjít Singh in 1819, who thus restored the supremacy of the ancient religion after more than four centuries of Moslem rule. The repose now enjoyed by it under the almost entirely unseen but distinctly felt influence of the English promises to reproduce something like the palmy days of the Moguls in the matter of improvement and embellishment, with a security to life and property under fixed and just laws quite unknown in their time.

A visitor familiar with all the scenic features of the happy valley would almost have us believe that artificial decoration has exhausted itself, and that the art now in demand is simply the art of letting Nature and antiquity alone:

"The valley of Kashmir, properly so called, remains, as in the seventeenth century, the largest and the most beautiful bit of landscape-gardening in the world, a park thirty leagues by ten or twelve. Everything in it seems planned with supernatural ingenuity to delight the eye—fields, orchards, dwellings, rivers and lakes sprinkled with green and flowery islets and ploughed by boats of varied form and size navigated by hanjis (boatmen) whose intelligent countenances, sculpturesque figures and graceful costumes harmonize admirably with the enchanting scenery; innumerable brooks and canals curving capriciously among lawns and rice-meadows and glittering in the sun like ribbons shot with silver."

This portrait leaves out the temples and villas, ancient and modern, the terraces and pavilions edged with the lotus and overhung with vines and plane trees, the Shalmiar Bagh, or Garden of Delight, and the Mishat Bagh, or Garden of Pleasure, where wine-loving Jehángír and his beautiful consort Núr Jahán, the Light of the World, luxuriated in the summers of long ago. This potentate declared that he would rather lose all the rest of his vast and affluent empire than Kashmir. It furnished a place of refreshing retreat for his energies and his conscience, the load of the latter being fully up to the average of an Eastern despot's. By these lulling waters and under this embowering verdure he could shut out from the sight and memory such spectacles as that to which he had treated his rebellious son Khosrou—a long row of seven hundred of the latter's accomplices seated in solemn gravity, but not returning his salute as he was led along, for the sufficient if not immediately perceptible reason that they sat upon thorns, each upon one thorn a foot or so long, of iron. We may suppose the father of Frederick the Great to have had in mind this passage of Oriental life when he forced the prince to witness the execution of his young friend Katte.

Wilson's preference is for the Garden of Pleasure, notwithstanding the elegance of that of Delight. It looks out upon Lake Dal, the Golden Island in front:

"Ten terraces, bounded by magnificent trees and with a stream of water falling over them, lead up to the latticed pavilion at the end of this garden. Between the double stories of this pavilion the stream flows through a marble—or at least a limestone—tank, and the structure is shaded by great chunár trees, while through a vista of their splendid foliage we look down the terraces and water-courses upon the lake below."

A fit dreaming-place this for the lotus-eating monarch of a lotus-eating people. The lake is so full of the lotus and other water-lilies that more than sixty thousand tons of the edible nuts are gathered each year and ground into flour, the root besides serving as a popular esculent. What is an object of devotion with the Tibetans of the higher Himáliyas a few days' journey distant, as formerly with the Egyptians, is to the Kashmiris an article of food and trade. They might draw from the waters, which cover a very small part of the fertile valley, fish enough to support, with the nelumbium nuts, nearly the whole of the present population; but then they are lotus-eaters, and as such improvident and indolent by all rules of poetry and legend.

Srinagar has been likened to Venice. Standing a mile higher in the world, water-communication is its dependence for movement of persons and things almost as exclusively as with the Queen of the Adriatic. For once, the lean, dry Oriental has his fill of water. Moisture prevails in excess. The characteristic flat roof of his house gives place to one with slope enough to shed any shower or number of showers; and that soon becomes clad with a spontaneous growth of plants. The surplus rainfall, however, is not so great as it would be were not the stormy south-west monsoons cut off by the mountains. The English, water-dogs by nature, and last from the blazing plains of the Panjab, do not complain of dampness. One of them, indeed, declares that "the air is exceedingly dry, notwithstanding the immense amount of water in the valley and the frequent showers of rain."

Srinagar—as the city known for four centuries as Kashmir was anciently and is again named under Hindú rule—is a little disappointing in the material employed for most of its structures. Stone is not wanting, but the deodar timber is more abundant, being floated down cheaply from the mountains, where it forms immense forests, the carefully preserved hunting-ground of the Mogul emperors. A Frenchman dubs it a city of chalets, and recommends the architects of Paris to seek there the most charming models for kiosks, verandas, turrets, cupolas, etc. The humblest suburban and rural abodes he pronounces full of the picturesque. They appear to be much in the Swiss style, so natural to an alpine region. They, too, are mostly of wood, except on the high slopes, where that material is scarce or wholly absent, and on the frontiers, where each hut is a little rock-fort.

Even the piers of the bridges over the Jhelam are, above the water at least, formed of large logs, which overlap each other and approach with their ends the middle of each span after the semblance of an arch. Parasitic plants, and even considerable trees, take root in their crevices and disguise the structure in an even more bizarre way than the mediæval buildings did Old London Bridge. There are seven of these bridges within the city, about three hundred feet long, and between them on either hand the houses overhang the water at the expense of all visible shore, sometimes striding out upon stilt-like piles, their multiform gables "fantastically set" with a total disregard of uniformity and extent of façade that would have been the death of Baron Haussmann or the builder of a Philadelphia block. Nevertheless, there is a pervading tone and style which would identify a Kashmiri villa transplanted into Christendom.

Two isolated hills overlooking the city, and visible afar off to the weary wayfarer, are crowned and flanked with fortifications and temples of one or the other religion. The list of the latter edifices included, in Bernier's time, a Hindú pagoda claimed by the inhabitants to have been built by Solomon, but it has now disappeared as completely as his better-authenticated effort at Jerusalem. In return, as compensation, a Mohammedan mosque has given place to a modern fort. The march of improvement or of change shows itself in a yet more modern array of cottages erected for the accommodation of English visitors. Here these gentry hide themselves in an absolute forest of fruit trees of the kinds familiar at home—apple, apricot, cherry, etc. The lovers of the apricot may be interested to learn that it is par excellence the fruit of this soi-disant Eden, this glittering attic-window upon the Roof of the World, and of all the slopes thereof up to the white-tiled roof-tree. It flourishes up to ten thousand feet, only the stone-pine, of all edibles, going higher; and dried apricots are a leading staple among the hillmen, as dates are with the Arabs.

Upon the bazaars the English architect has laid his heavy hand, and villas and shops like those of the Thames promise to mark the artistic renaissance of Kashmir. The pleasure-houses of the emperors before mentioned have so far escaped him, although it is to be feared he will soon have the repairing of them. Their principal charms, the turf, the great trees and the cascades, were never more beautiful, and have rather gained by the softness with which age has enriched them. The trees have been steadily growing under all flags and cults, swelling in pride and strength as they looked contemptuously and calmly down on the storms of human passion. They need no repairs, and their style, nobody knows how much older than Thebes or Dendera, will endure no modification.

The level surface of this alluvion is illustrated by the very slight descent of the Jhelam. From Ismaïlabad, near the head of the valley, and fifty-four hundred feet above the level of the sea, the fall to Srinagar, thirty miles, is seventy-five feet; and from the capital to Lake Wúlar, twenty-four miles below, only fifty-five feet—declivities in marked contrast with the fall of two thousand eight hundred feet in eighty miles from the edge of the plateau at Baramúla to the plain of the Panjab. Besides the ancient beaches which indicate the origin of this upland meadow, there are traceable other and more recent evidences of a change of level in the waters, pointing to an elevation, as the former do to subsidence. In the Manas-Bal, the smallest but deepest of the Kashmirian lakes, submerged ruins, alleged to be those of a temple, are clearly visible. At another point, fifteen miles below Srinagar, ruins and fragments of pottery have been exhumed at a great depth. One of these oscillations appears to be now, or to have been within two centuries, in progress. Lake Wúlar has grown shallower, its present average depth being forty feet.

Man, among these enormous mountains, presents not less notably than inanimate Nature a singular compound of change and solidity, of the catastrophic and the secular. The little state of Kashmir, overrun from time immemorial, in peace or war, by hordes of many races and tongues, preserves a language and a physiognomy of its own. About forty per cent. of the words in Kashmiri are Persian, twenty-five Sanscrit, fifteen Hindústhani, ten Arabic and fifteen Mongol. Its letters resemble those of the Sanscrit, and are apparently the originals of the Tibetan characters. They are not much used, the literary capabilities of the Kashmiris remaining to be developed. Travellers say the men, especially the upper classes who have maintained the purity of their blood, are the finest, physically, to be found in the Himáliya. They are stout, well-built, and pleasing in countenance, resembling Europeans, except in having a darker complexion. They are more acute and intelligent than the Sikhs and than the Dográs or Hindús of Jummoo, their present superiors politically. They are industrious, manufacturing besides shawls other stuffs and much fancy-work in wood. The beauty of the women is as much remarked upon now as in the old days, and the late Mr. Moore cannot be accused of overstepping poetic license on that point.

The higher classes of the Kashmiris having held more firmly to their religion during Mohammedan sway, most of the non-Moslem inhabitants are Brahmans, and they live chiefly in the city. Unlike their co-religionists of the province of Jummoo, many of whose high-caste men cultivate the soil, the Kashmiri Brahmans contemn manual occupations. They are largely employed in the offices of the state. The lowest occupations are left to a class of pariahs called Batals, who are considered by some to represent a wholly distinct race, a remnant of the aborigines who were dispossessed by the first Aryan settlers. As it is easier to procure photographs of individuals belonging to this degraded class than of those above them, an unjust impression of the physical traits of the Kashmiris is apt to reach the Western World. The dancing-girls are Batals, and are pronounced by those who know very unfavorable specimens of the Kashmiri fair. The Mohammedan women are always veiled.

But ethnic science, whether based on linguistic, physical, social or religious distinctions, is in a very unsatisfactory condition. Surprising yet illusory resemblances are constantly cropping up in the most unexpected ways and places. Wilson was struck with the Gaelic traits of the Mongolian Búdhists who inhabit the mountains of Zanskar, south-east of the valley. "The sound of their language, the brooches which fasten their plaids, the varieties of tartan which their woollen clothes present, and even the features of the people (which are of an Aryan rather than a Tartar type), strongly reminded me of the Scotch Highlanders." He had the support, too, of one of those imaginative savants who delight in Welsh, Erse and Gaelic philology, who insisted "that the names of innumerable places in Tibet and Tartary are identical with the local names of the Gaelic language." Add to this the fact that a corps of the maharajah's army is uniformed in an almost critically exact reproduction of "the garb of old Gaul," and the argument is a good deal more complete than many on more practically momentous points which have done service for centuries and are still accepted. We have the Gauls of Galatia, Galatz, Galicia, Gallia proper and Gaeldoch (or Caledonia), forming a continuous chain of Gallic settlements from the Himáliya to the Ultima Thule. And now the circuit is complete. The current sets back from the West. The slogan, heard so tellingly at Lucknow, is swelling up the glaciers of the Asiatic fatherland to save it from the Scythians! Monkbarns lived too soon.

The Mohammedans of Baltistán, on the opposite (or northern) side of Kashmir, again surprise us by speaking a Tartar tongue. We are not told that they are Scotch, endowed though they undoubtedly are with some of the canny and thrifty characteristics of the dwellers ayont the Tweed. They are inveterate tradesmen, and carry their small wares, including hill-ponies, all through the mountains. Let us drop in upon them, if such an expression be applicable to a climb of the most tremendous description. It takes us up the steps of the steepest and loftiest slope of the amphitheatre which forms the maharajah's dominions. First, however, we begin by a gentle and pleasant descent down the Jhelam to Lake Wúlar. Then begins the trouble. We turn northward, and find ourselves at the end of the first stage four thousand feet above the valley, on the brink of an artificial sheet of water surrounded by dense evergreen woods. Next day we rise 2000 feet higher, and redescend 6500 feet to the banks of the Kischanganga, the chief affluent of the Jhelam, running mostly parallel to the course of the latter stream. Then we undulate—if so soft a term be applicable to a route so sharply, abruptly and irregularly serrate—along the spurs which border the river, now in the forest and now on a bleak plateau where careful irrigation avails to grow nothing less hardy than millet, peas and buckwheat. In crossing to the valley, or rather trench, of the upper Indus, we have the choice of two passes, one 13,060 and the other 13,500 feet above tide. Having selected the least of these two evils, we swoop nearly six thousand feet down upon the village of Astor and a new language, the Dard. The temptation to stop and study either is small. If we are insatiate of climbing or find the heat at Astor—only 7853 feet above the sea—oppressive, we have the ice-cone of Nanga Parbat, 26,629 feet high, within ten miles to the west. We are within unpleasantly easy reach of the western and north-western frontier now; for the opposite slope of Nanga Parbat and the ridge to which it belongs is held by the independent Mohammedan tribes of Yaghistán, born marauders since the beginning of tradition. They have a republican form of government, one of the fierce democracies numbering only seven houses. Life, liberty and the pursuit of other people's property is a motto they act up to with a persistency and consistency highly disagreeable to their neighbors over the hill. The latter have, in self-defence, evinced a tendency to adopt the same rule of action, and to steal from their friends by way of reimbursement for what is stolen by their enemies—a disposition which is discouraged by the maintenance of a considerable garrison at Astor.

The valley of Gilgit, continuous with that of Astor, inasmuch as the two abut upon the Indus at nearly the same point, one falling and the other rising, is the core of a tongue of territory projecting north-west into the heart of Yaghistán, and nearly dividing that turbulent region into two parts. The British in attaching this corner to Kashmir rather strained established boundaries in their own favor, and will doubtless continue the process till all Yaghistán is absorbed and the great Karakoram range becomes the frontier from the Afghan territory to that of Chinese Tibet.

At the town of Gilgit we have a reproduction in little of the valley of Srinagar. Its level is somewhat lower, and, though farther north by two degrees, it ripens such southern fruits as the pomegranate, etc. Its attractions will not, however, have full sway so long as the peace of the region remains precarious. The last attack from Yaghistán was signally repulsed in 1866. The practice of going armed is still general, and travellers need an escort. Some of the villages resemble the casemates, mines and covered-ways of a fortress. The people are of the same family and religion with those over the border, their foes, although perhaps less hated by them than their nominal compatriots the Kashmiris and Dográs. The Dards are an active and proud people, fond of independence, with features distinctly Caucasian.

Continuing our exploration of the upper benches of the amphitheatre, we turn to the right and skirt the upper Indus, which runs for several hundred miles from south-east to north-west close along the southern foot of the Karakoram, or rather upon a "hip" of the Roof of the World. Skárdú, on the left bank, was an independent capital down to 1840, and its aspect is still stormy in a political as in a climatic sense. The land looks like a petrified storm, the waves of granite and slate dotted sporadically with huts and microscopic bits of culture. Only in a few of the deep valleys is Nature less inhospitable. The glaciers descend to an altitude of 13,500 feet, with an upward extent of twenty-five miles or more; cultivation, after a fashion, existing at their lower edge, and grass growing for a season of six or eight weeks much farther up. The Báltoro glacier leads up to a stupendous peak, the second in height of all known elevations, but not yet dignified with a name, being only labelled in the Indian Survey "K. 2." Its height is 28,265 feet, or 687 less than Gaurisankar, the giant of mountains, a peak in the Eastern Himáliya. The summits next to K.2 are from 25,000 to 27,000 feet. Among them lies the pass of Mustagh, 18,300 feet above tide, up to 1863 a high-road between India and Yarkand, practicable for but a few weeks of summer. The brief interval left by the snow the brigands have extinguished.

After the abandonment of this pass, that of Karakoram, forty leagues east of it, became the principal route to Central Asia. The elevation is exactly the same. Of the five hundred and fifteen miles, divided into thirty-five marches, between Leh and Yarkand, a hundred and fifty traverse ice, naked rocks and precipices, wholly devoid of grass or fuel. Still farther east, in the extreme north-eastern angle of Ladákh and the Kashmiri states, a third route to Turkestan has been opened. It is longer than the others, but is practicable for near half the year, and can be traversed by horses and two-humped camels instead of yaks and ponies, as at the western crossings. On three stages only are wood and grass absent. It ascends from the south over a plateau marked by salt or brackish lakes. It is difficult to say which of the three contestant empires, Russia, China and England, has easiest or least impracticable access to the coveted core of Asia.

If the handful of Little Tibetans occupy the gallery of the Kashmiri theatre, there are wells in it which go down to the level of the dress-circle. These lower levels have traits of culture—trees, grass, whitewashed brick or stone dwellings, and nunneries and religious monuments on the roadside and sometimes arching the road. All, high and low in rank and topography, are deeply pious, and devote the greater part of their waking hours to muttering a supplicatory formula of six syllables, so far translatable by Christians only to the extent of its meaning something about the Deity and the lotus.

The trip from New York to Jummoo is about as long in point of time as to California twenty-five years ago. As many years hence the survivors of us may be getting up Thanksgiving or Christmas reunions at the old homestead of the Aryan family. It will never be a hackneyed spot. It stands too much on end. Steep mountains are never hackneyed: Cook's Personally Conducted will never permeate Kashmir.

Edward C. Bruce.

"FOR PERCIVAL."

He did not see her again for two days, though he watched anxiously for her. Bertie came in and out, and was much as usual. On the third evening, as Percival was going up stairs, she called after him: "Mr. Thorne."

He turned eagerly.

"You lent Bertie some money a day or two since?"

Something in her voice or her look made Percival sure that Lisle had borrowed and spent it without her knowledge, and that it was a trouble to her. After all, what did it matter? He would sell his watch and pay Mrs. Bryant. He could not deny Bertie's debt, since she had found it out, but he could make light of it. So he nodded: "Yes, by the the way, I believe I did: he hadn't his purse or something." This in a tone of airy indifference.

"Tell me how much it was, please, and I'll pay it back." Then he saw that her purse was open in her hand.

"Oh, it doesn't matter," Percival said: "don't pay me off in such a quick, business-like way, Miss Lisle. I'm not the milkman, nor yet the washing. Bertie will settle with me one of these days."

"Please tell me, Mr. Thorne. I mean to pay it: I must."

"Well, I'll ask him about it, then."

"You know," with a look of reproach and pleading.

Percival could not deceive her, she looked so sorrowfully resolute. He met the glance of her gray eyes. "Two pounds," he said; and was certain that she was relieved at the answer.

"Bertie wasn't sure it wasn't two pounds ten."

"On my honor, no. He asked me for a couple of sovereigns, and I took it literally."

"If you say so, I am sure. I didn't doubt you: I only told you that you might understand why I asked." She put the money, a sovereign and two halves, into his unwilling hand. Then he understood her relief, for, looking down into the little sealskin purse, he saw that there was no more gold in it. The last ten shillings must have been counted out in silver, and he was not quite sure it would not have ended in a threepenny piece and some halfpence.

"Now I am going to ask a favor," she said. "Don't lend Bertie any more, please. He has been used to spend just what he liked, and he doesn't think, poor boy! And it is only wasted. Don't let him have any more."

"But, Miss Lisle," said Percival, "if your brother asks me do you mean that I am to say 'No'?"

"Please, if you would. He mustn't be extravagant: we can't afford it. He can't pay you back, and if I lost any of my work—Mrs. Barton's lessons, for instance—I couldn't either."

"You work to pay me!" exclaimed Percival aghast: "I won't hear of such a thing. Miss Lisle, you mustn't! It's between Bertie and myself, and I shouldn't be ruined if he didn't pay me till his ship comes home one of these days. Take it back, please, and he and I will arrange it."

She shook her head: "No: my brother's debts are mine."

"Ah!" said Percival, with a swift, eloquent glance. "Then let me be your creditor a little longer: I hardly know what it feels like, yet."

"Since when has your ship come home, Mr. Thorne, that you can afford to be so generous?"

The blood mounted to his forehead at her question, but he answered quickly: "My ship has not come home. Perhaps if it had I should not dare to ask you to let me help you. I feel as if our poverty made us all nearer together."

"It is not every one who would say so in your place," Judith replied. "I am your debtor for those words. But we Lisles have wronged you too much already: you shouldn't try to make the load heavier."

"Wronged me?" he faltered.

"Did you think I did not know? My father had your money and ruined you: deny it if you can! I suspected it, and lately I have been sure. Oh, if Bertie and I could pay you back! But meanwhile he shall not borrow from you and waste your earnings on his silly whims. If you lend him any more you may try to hide it from me, but I shall find it out, and I will pay it—every farthing. I will find some way, if I have to sit up every night for a week and work my fingers to the bone."

"God forbid!" said Percival. "He shall have no more from me. But be generous, and promise me that if you should want help, such as my poverty can give, you will forget old times and come to me."

"No, I won't promise that. I will remember them and come." She caught his hand, pressed it one moment in her own, flung it from her and escaped.

"Judith!" he called after her, but she was gone.

Percival went into his own room. The money had come just in time, for his landlady's weekly account was lying on the table. He looked at the three coins with lingering tenderness, and after a moment's hesitation he took one of them and vowed that he would never part with it. Yet in the midst of his ardent resolution he smiled rather bitterly to think that it was not the sovereign, but one of the halves, he meant to keep for ever. Poverty had taught him many lessons, and among them how to combine economy and sentiment. "If she had given me the ten shillings' worth of silver, I suppose I should have saved the threepenny bit!" he said to himself as he locked his little remembrance in his desk.

A couple of days later, as he was walking home with Bertie, they passed three or four men who were sauntering idly along, and Thorne felt sure that his companion received and returned a silent glance of recognition. He glanced over his shoulder at them, and disliked their look exceedingly. "Do you know who those fellows were we passed just now?" he said.

Bertie looked back: "One is the brother of a man in our choir."

"Hm! I wouldn't have one of them for my brother at any price," said Percival. The matter dropped, but he could not forget it. He fancied that there was a slight change in Bertie himself—that the boy's face was keener and haggard, and there was an anxious expression in his eyes. But he owned frankly that he was not at all sure that he should have noticed anything if his suspicions had not been previously aroused.

"Come in this evening," said Bertie when they went up stairs. He leant against the door of Percival's room, and as his friend hesitated he called to his sister: "Here, Judith! tell Thorne to come and have some tea with us: they've let his fire out, and his room is as warm and cheerful as a sepulchre."

"Do you think I order other people about as I do you?" she replied.—"Will you come, Mr. Thorne? I can, at any rate, promise you a fire and a welcome."

When she met him she was quite calm, tranquil and clear-eyed. Do the ripples of the summer sea recall that distant line, the supreme effort of wind and tide some stormy night? Percival would have thought that it had been all a dream but for the little coin which that wave had flung at his feet for a remembrance. And he had called after her "Judith!" The tide had ebbed, and he did not even think of her as other than Miss Lisle. Had she heard him that evening? He would almost have hoped not, but that twilight moment seemed so far away that it must be absurd to link it with his every-day life.

Apparently, she and Bertie were on their usual footing. Did the young fellow know of that absurd mistake about old Fordham? Did Percival really detect a shade of dim apprehension on Judith Lisle's face, as if she hid an unspoken fear? As Bertie leant forward and the lamplight shone on his clearly-cut features, Percival was more than ever certain of the change in him. Could his sister fail to see it?

"Bertie," she said when they had finished their tea and were standing round the fire—"Bertie, I'm afraid you have lost one of your pupils."

He had his elbow on the chimney-piece, his hand hung loosely open, and his eyes were fixed upon the leaping flames. When Judith spoke he looked up inquiringly.

"Miss Nash—Emmeline Nash," said Judith.

Percival happened to be looking at the fire too, and he suddenly saw Bertie's fingers drawn quickly up. But the young master spoke very composedly indeed: "Emmeline Nash—why? Has anything happened?"

"No: only Mr. Nash has given in at last, and says she may go home at Easter for good.—She is older than any of the other pupils, Mr. Thorne: in fact, she is not treated as a pupil. But her father is—"

"An old fossil," said Bertie.

"Well!—interested in fossils and that sort of thing, and a widower; so there has not been much of a home for her, and he always fancied she was better at school. But school can't last for ever."

"Happiest time of one's life!" Bertie ejaculated.

"Oh! do you think so?" said Judith doubtfully.

"Not at all. But I believe it is the right thing to say."

"Stupid boy!—And as she will very soon be twenty, I really think she ought not to be kept there any longer."

"Of course Miss Nash is delighted," said Percival.

"Yes, but hardly as much so as I expected. One's castles in the air don't look quite the same when one is close to them. I am afraid, her home-life won't be very bright."

"Perhaps she will make it brighter," said Thorne. "What is she like? Is she pretty?"

"Yes," said Bertie.

Judith smiled: "One has to qualify all one's adjectives for her. She is nice-ish, pretty-ish: I doubt if she is as much as clever-ish."

"No need for her to be any more," Bertie remarked. "Didn't Miss Crawford say she would come in for a lot of money—some of her mother's—when she was one-and-twenty?"

"Yes, five or six hundred a year."

"That's why he has kept her at school, I suppose—afraid she should take up with a curate, very likely."

"Mr. Nash is very rich too, and she is an only child," said Judith, ignoring Bertie's remark. "But I think it has been hard on Emmeline."

"Well, I'm sorry she is going," said Lisle—"very sorry."

"Is she such a promising pupil?" Thorne inquired.

"She's a nice girl," said Bertie, "but a promising pupil—O Lord!" He flew to the piano, played an air in a singularly wooden manner, and then dragged it languidly, yet laboriously, up and down the keys. "Variations, you perceive." After a little more of this treatment the unfortunate melody grew very lame indeed, and finally died of exhaustion. "That's Miss Emmeline Nash," said Bertie, spinning round on the music-stool and confronting Percival.

"It is very like Emmeline's style of playing," Judith owned.

"Of course it is. Let's have something else for a change." And turning back to the piano, he began to sing. Then he called Judith to come and take her turn. She sang well, and Percival, by the fireside, noted the young fellow's evident pride in her performance, and admired the pair. (Any one else might have admired the three, for Thorne's grave, foreign-looking face was just the fitting contrast to the Lisles' fair, clear features. The morbid depression of a couple of months earlier had passed, and left him far more like the Percival of Brackenhill. Poverty surrounded the friends and dulled their lives, but as yet it was only a burden, not a blight.)

"You sing," said Bertie, looking back. "I remember you were great at some of those old songs. I'll play for you: what shall it be?"

"I'm sure I hardly know," said Percival, coming forward.

"Let's have 'Shall I, wasting in despair,'" Lisle suggested. "It has been going in my head all this morning." He played a few notes.

"No, no!" the other exclaimed hurriedly—"not that." Too well he remembered the tender devotion of more than a year before: