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216 environment or the contrasting presence of the tramping sentry on duty, turbaned and accoutred to perfection, spindle legs wound with smooth putties, and the enormous English shoes blacked to a drill-sergeant's dream. Such loungers at the guard-house door are on view at every show fort and palace in India, incongruous, disillusioning, but thereby the real thing. Incongruity is the regular order in India, splendor and shabbiness, dirt and riches, luxury and squalor always going together. We were free to roam the courts and garden spaces of the palace unhindered, from Shah Jahan's open audience-hall, or music-room, with its panels of Florentine mosaic on black marble ground, to that inner throne-room, the most splendid in the world. This peerless Diwan-i-Khas, one mass of rich decoration from the inlaid floor to the golden ceiling, was worthy setting for the Peacock Throne. The renegade Frenchman or Italian who planned the palaces of Shah Jahan, and the skilled workmen brought from all the centers of Mohammedan luxury, made the Delhi palace equal in decorative details to the Agra palace and the Taj. "If there is on earth an Eden of bliss, it is this, it is this, it is this," was appropriately inlaid in Persian letters in this throne-room, whose square columns, arches, spandrils, frieze, and moldings are decorated with exquisite pietra dura. A small dais shows where stood the Peacock Throne, that low, square chair completely sheathed in rubies, pearls, diamonds, emeralds, and other stones, the Koh-i-nur one of the peacock's eyes, and a life-sized