Following the Equator (National Geographic Adventure Classics) Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean. ? Pudd'nhead Wilson's Nrw Calendar. YOU soon find your long-ago dreams of India rising in a sort of vague and luscious moonlight above the horizon-rim of your opaque consciousness, and softly lighting up a thousand forgotten details which were parts of a vision that had once been vivid to you when you were a boy, and steeped your spirit in tales of the East. The barbaric gor- geousnesses, for instance; and the princely titles, the sumptuous titles, the sounding titles,? how good they taste in the mouth! The Nizam of Hyderabad ; the Maharajah of Travancore; the Nabob of Jubbulpore; the Begum of Bhopal; the Nawab of Mysore; the Ranee of Gulnare; the Ahkoond of Swat; the Rao of Rohilkund; the Gaikwar of Baroda. Indeed, it is a country that runs richly to name. The great god Vishnu has 108? 108 special ones?108 peculiarly holy ones ? names just for Sunday use only. I learned the whole of Vishnu's LO8 by heart once, but they wouldn't stay; I don't remember any of them now but John W. c" (35) And the romances connected with those princely native houses ? to this day they are always turning up, just as in the old, old times. They were sweating out a romance in an English court in Bombay a while before we were there. In this case a native prince, 16 years old, who has been enjoying his titles and dignities and estates unmolested for fourteen years, is suddenly haled into court on the charge that he is rightfully no prince at all, but a pauper peasant; that the real prince died when two and one- half years old; that the death was concealed, and a peasant child smuggled into the royal cradle, and that this present incumbent was that smuggled substitute. This is the very material that so many o...Read More