Page:Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta.djvu/495

Rh ﻿He amuses himself with the parade of royalty and with a multitude of diversions, hiring French circus-riders, keeping a great number of horses, whose stables are elegantly fitted up and hung with looking-glasses, and also maintaining a number of elephants. He had a carriage constructed large enough to hold ninety persons, to be drawn by six of these huge creatures, as a royal variety to the usual mode of riding in a howdah on the elephant's back.

The rajah is a bigoted Hindu, and completely under Brahminic influence. In his palace he keeps as an object of worship a cow, which is covered with jewels, silver, and gold. About the time of our return through the city from the Neilgherries, he had just gone through with a peculiar means of getting rid of his sins. He had been told by his attendantBrahmin, his confessor and the keeper of his conscience, that his horoscope, calculated from the position of the starry constellations at his birth, showed that he had but two years to live. The rajah therefore determined to get rid of the accumulated sins of the past years. For this purpose, a number of Brahmins, willing to bear his sins för a good compensation, were collected at the palace. The rajah, dressed in his robes, with