"Nourisher of the poor! no."

"Well, then, I _hear_ a chicken," said my friend, conclusively.

"O great king," said the Mohammedan, turning to me, "there _is_ a
chicken."

In a twinkling the cook caught the chicken: its head was turned toward
Mecca. Bismillah! O God the Compassionate, the Merciful! the poor
fowl's head flew off, and by the time we had made our ablutions supper
was ready.

Turning across the ridges to the north-eastward from Sipri, we were
soon making our way among the tanks and groves which lie about the
walls of Jhansi. Here, as at Poona, there was ever present to me a
sense of evil destinies, of blood, of treacheries, which seemed to
linger about the trees and the tanks like exhalations from the old
crimes which have stained the soil of the country. For Jhansi is in
the Bundelcund, and the Bundelcund was born in great iniquity. The
very name--which properly is _Bundelakhand,_ or "the country of the
Bundelas"--has a history thickly set about with the terrors of caste,
of murder and of usurpation. Some five hundred years ago a certain
Rajput prince, Hurdeo Sing, committed the unpardonable sin of marrying
a slave (_bundi_), and was in consequence expelled from the Kshatriya
caste to which he belonged. He fled with his disgrace into this
region, and after some years found opportunity at least to salve his
wounds with blood and power. The son of the king into whose land he
had escaped conceived a passion for the daughter of the slave wife.
It must needs have been a mighty sentiment, for the conditions which