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The fortress-crowned hills look down upon the strange medley. One of them bears on its flank in huge white letters the cheery inscript “Welcome!” This was made when the Prince of Wales visited Jeypore to shoot his first tiger; but the average traveller of to-day may appropriate the message to himself, for Jeypore takes great care of strangers and shows them all courtesy. This, by the way, demoralises the Globe-Trotter, whose first cry is:—“Where can we get horses? Where can we get elephants? Who is the man to write to for all these things?”

Thanks to the courtesy of the Maharaja, it is possible to see everything, but for the incurious who object to being driven through their sights, a journey down any one of the great main streets is a day’s delightful occupation. The view is as unobstructed as that of the Champs Elysees; but in place of the white-stone fronts of Paris, rises a long line of open-work screen-wall, the prevailing tone of which is pink—caramel pink, but house-owners have unlimited license to decorate their tenements as they please. Jeypore, broadly considered, is Hindu, and her architecture of the riotous many-arched type which even the Globe-Trotter after a short time learns to call Hindu. It is neither temperate nor noble, but it satisfies the general desire for something that “really looks Indian.” A perverse taste for low company drew the Englishman from the pavement—to walk upon a real stone pavement is in itself a privilege—up a side-street where he assisted at a quail fight and found the low-caste Rajput a cheery and affable soul. The owner of the losing quail was a sowar in the Maharaja’s army. He explained that his pay was six rupees a month paid bi-monthly. He was cut the cost of his khaki blouse, brown-leather accoutrements and jack-boots; lance, saddle, sword, and horse were given free. He refused to say for how many months in the year he was drilled, and said vaguely that his duties were mainly escort ones, and he had no fault to find with them. The defeat of his quail had vexed him; and he desired the Sahib to understand that the sowars of His Highness’s army could ride. A clumsy attempt at a compliment so fired his martial blood that he climbed into his saddle, and then and there insisted on showing off his horsemanship. The road was narrow, the lance was long, and the horse was a big one, but no one objected, and the Englishman sat him down on a doorstep and watched the fun. The horse seemed in some shadowy way familiar. His head was not the lean head of the Kathiawar, nor his crest the crest of the Marwarri, and his fore-legs did not seem to belong to the stony district. “Where did he come from?” The sowar pointed northward and said “from Amritsar,” but he pronounced it “Armtzar.” Many horses had been brought at the spring fairs in the Punpab; they cost about Rs. 200 each, perhaps more, the sowar could not say. Some came from Hissar and some from other places beyond Delhi. They were very good horses. “That horse there,” he pointed to one a little distance down the street, “is the son of a big Sirkar horse—the kind that the Sirkar make for breeding horses—so high!” The owner of “that horse” swaggered up, jaw-bandaged and cat-moustached, and bade the Englishman look at his mouth; bought, of course, when a butcha. Both men together said that the Sahib had better examine the Maharaja Sahib’s stable, where there were hundreds of horses—huge as elephants or tiny as sheep.