ABSTRACT
I am on my way to the strange North. A conference has been called on Mohammedan work in Lucknow. It was thrilling at the Junction this morning to see the great mails go by, Delhi to Bombay, Bombay to Calcutta, and to read such lovely titles as Behar and Orissa Railway, Rohilkand Railway. After our more clumsy southern names-for who is attracted at first sound by Ittekallipalli, Muntimadugu, Doddaballapura ? — I repeated with endless pleasure, Rohilkand, Rohilkand!The country glides past and the outlook from the windows is tugging at my heart. Meadows with the evening mist rising from them, fields with large trees dotted about; a crisp keen air; it might be England!Lucknow. I arrived in the dark, so saw scarcely anything of the city as we drove through it, but when I reached the Mission settlement where I am lodged, behold it was an old palace of the kings of Oudh. In the Mutiny some Mission property was destroyed; in compensation this palace was given to them. I am in a room about twenty-four feet high; it is reached by odd passages round sudden corners. One door opens on a courtyard enclosed by a wall-was this the women’s quarter? did they take the air on that grass plot? There are strange exits, hidden doors and stairs; I feel in a new world of intrigue and romance, or, rather, a very old one, and look longingly at the walls to tell me what they have seen. After dinner I did not join the multitude in the drawing-room, but went out into the starlit garden where presumably the old kings used to walk. “ Ere ever the ancient years had gone
what had been thought and suffered in these very grounds by another race ?
