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54 and every possible article of Hindu jewelry worn for these two thousand years—forms and designs but little changed in two thousand years; the same ancient, archaic Swami or Dravidian style of ornaments having been worn centuries before Chidambram's building, according to the sculptured records of the Buddhist monuments. Every piece was crusted over, inlaid with rubies and diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, and pearls; with emeralds as big as bullets—great drops of green dew; with sapphires the size of filberts and walnuts, sunk in pure, dull yellow gold as soft as wax. There were rubies, rubies, rubies—rubies everywhere—thick as pebbles on a beach,—and all of them smoothly rounded drops, blobs, or uneven lumps of warm and splendid color that went to the heart. A Western lapidary or jeweler would scoff at and perhaps scorn these masses of roughly cut cabochon gems, whose flaws and feathers and cloudings make them of little commercial but of such great artistic value. Crystalline perfection was not the first test which the old Hindu jewelers applied to their gems. With an eye first to color effects and rich combinations of color, all the flawed stones, the splinters and scales and pin-points of color, had their value to them, and with them they achieved results of such richness, such gorgeousness and splendor, that our mechanically perfect, geometrically exact, many-faceted, flashing gems of Western jewelry seem cold, characterless, expressionless beside these living gems of the East. We were fairly dizzy with the glow and glitter and gorgeousness of the display, the feast of gems and