westward. Deep down beneath us, patient crops of millet were standing in their places, waiting for the water to pass away; acres of broad-leafed melons looked up at our boat as we wound in and out among the trees and little temples. With some thirty feet of water below us we floated over the brickfields and came to a village, and, skirting the ruins of the suburbs, passed out again through a tope of mango-trees into the open. A garden lay before us. The pillars of the gateway had strange animals upon the tops of them, rampant against shields; but in the flood they looked as if they were standing tiptoe upon their hind legs in the hope of keeping out of the water which lapped over their clawed feet. Over the wall and into the garden. Such a place for Naiads! The tops of plantain-trees instead of lotus-pads, for bulrushes bamboo spikes, and instead of water-tangle the fair green crowns of bushes, lit up with blossoms. Rustling through the guava-tops, half-ripened citrons knocking against our boat’s keel, we pass out over the other wall of the garden, and found ourselves in a superb canal, avenued on either side with tamarinds, their lowest branches dipping in the flood, and closed in at the further end with a handsome pleasure-house that stood — the only building, except the stone-built temples, that had braved the rush of the escaping river — knee-deep in the water. The scene had all the charms of land and water, without the blemishes of either; for the water had no vulgar banks, no slimy slopes nor leprous sand-patches; while the houses had no lower stories, and the round crowns of foliage no unsightly trunks. And there was not a human being in sight! River terns swept in and out among the garden trees, furrowing the new water-fields
