satisfaction whenever any of the ladies concluded their performance....
The only occasion on which such an exhibition of feeling is to be
witnessed in Hindustan, is when some offender is put upon a donkey, with a
string of old shoes round his neck, and his face blackened and turned to
the tail, and in this plight expelled from the city. Then only do the
boys--men never--clap their hands and cry hurra! hurra! Thus, that which
in one country implies shame and disgrace, is resorted to in another to
express the highest degree of approbation!"

Passing over the Khan's visits to the Athenæum Club-house, to Buckingham
Palace, &c., his remarks on which contain nothing noticeable, except his
mistaking some of the ancient portraits in the palace, from their long
beards and rosaries, for the representations of Moslem divines, we find
him at last fairly in the midst of an English winter, and an eyewitness of
a spectacle of all others the most marvellous and incredible to a
Hindustani, and which Mirza Abu-Talib, while describing it, frankly
confesses he cannot expect his countrymen to believe--the ice and the
skaters in the Regent's Park.[8] "What I had previously seen in the
summer as water, with birds swimming and boats rowing upon it, was now
transformed into an immense sheet of ice as hard as rock, on which
thousands of persons, men, women, and children, were actually walking,
running, and figuring in the most extraordinary manner. I saw men pass
with the rapidity of an arrow, turning, wheeling, retrograding, and
describing figures with surprising agility, sometimes on both, but more
frequently on only one leg; they had all a piece of steel, turned up in
front somewhat in the manner of our slippers, fastened to their shoes, by
means of which they propelled themselves as I have described. After much
persuasion, I went on the ice myself; though not without considerable fear;
yet such a favourite sport is this with the English, and so infatuated are
some of these _ice players_, that nothing will deter them from venturing