Crossword-Solution: GAEKWAR 7 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 15

Polk coming down the steps of the hotel at which sojourned His Highness the Gaekwar of Baroda, most enlightened of the Mahratta princes, who, of late, ate bread and salt in our Metropolis of the Occident.

Hang the luck! Emeralds, rubies, sapphires, pearls, and diamonds! No doubt many of them with histories--in a bag hung to his neck--and all these thousands of miles! Not since the advent of the Gaekwar of Baroda into San Francisco, in 1910, had so many fine stones passed through that port of entry.

Still more bloody was the battle, which about the middle of the eighteenth century the Afghan Sultan Ahmed Shah Durani fought with the great Mahratha princes, Holkar Sindhia, Gaekwar and the Peschwas; and here, once again, all the horrors of war raged, when in the year 1857, the English Generals Havelock, Sir James Outram, Sir Colin Campbell, Sir Hugh Rose, Sir John Lawrence, and Sir Robert Napier, crushed with pitiless severity the dangerous sepoy mutiny.

The Gaekwar of Baroda, during my sojourn in his State, most kindly furnished me with opportunities of witnessing the excellent training of his falcons, hunting leopards, or cheetahs, and other animals.

About a dozen green parrots were spectators, who were allowed to remain on perches, while the best-trained gunner was to perform in public before at least three thousand spectators, the Gaekwar, and his ministers, and friends, including ourselves, being seated in a raised structure similar to the grand stand of an English racecourse, which commanded the entire arena, the parrots being immediately beneath.