ONE:By the roadside came two figures tottering along, and then, turning to look at me, showed me the horror of their shrivelled bodies, their dimmed eyes��all that seemed alive in those drawn faces of skin and bone��the jaw stiffened in a skull-like grimace; victims of the famine, who had come from the Central Provinces where there had been no rain for two years, and where everything was dying. This couple were making their way to a poorhouse hard by. They had come from a village in Bundelkund, whence all the inhabitants had fled��themselves the sole survivors of a family of eighteen souls. First the children died, then the very old folks. These two had kept themselves alive on what had been given them on the way, but immigrants soon were too many in the districts unvisited by famine, and ere long they could get nothing; then they fed on roots, on what they[Pg 191] could steal from fields or garden-plots, or found left to rot, scorned even by the beasts.A prodigious palace has left the skeleton of its walls pierced with large windows, and in the blackened stone, almost at the top of the building, a balcony with a canopy over it, resting on fragile columns, is still uninjured; of a pale yellow, like lemon-tree wood, it looks as if it had come into existence only yesterday, a flower risen from the death of the ruins. Pellentesque consequat aliquam hendrerit. Nam eget tellus felis. Aenean aliquam pretium felis, eu varius sapien. Mauris porttitor condimentum faucibus.

Nulla facilisi. Nunc convallis tortor non egestas auctor. Sed quis bibendum ex. In hac habitasse platea dictumstNunc at elit commodo, placerat massa in, feugiat ipsum. Cras sed dolor vitae mauris tristique finibus eu a libero. Ut id augue posuere, faucibus urna nec, pulvinar leo. Sed nunc lectus, vestibulum nec efficitur sit amet,