The Savannah morning news., 1903-07-12
By JOHN K. BALCOLM.
Copyright, 1908, by E. B. Warner.

Among the royalties. ex-royalties and
other people of title who are expected
to visit America next year during the
Louisiana Purchase Exposition is the
Maharanee Jar Mahomed Rao, a
shrewd, little woman of sixty-two, with
keen, bright eyes, who lives in Oren-
burg, Russia, where she holds Oriental
court in the biggest house in town
and is treated with immense respect
by the officials of the Car. The story
of her life is a veritable fairy tale.
Once she was pretty Alice Clifton,
the daughter of the British soldier who
served John Company" in the can
tonments at Delhi, in the old pre-
mutiny days. Now she is a dethroned
queen, a queen in exile, a monarch
without a crown, like her brothers and
sisters in the right divine, the French
Bounbons, the Hanoverian Guelphs,
the BOnapartes, and Ranava1ona of
the more ancient house of Madagas-
car.
A Life of Strange Romance.
A hundred romances rolled into one
would not make up the life of Alice
Clifton.
AS child she played, half-lad in
the mud of the barrack yard in many
an Indian station, while all around her
men lay dead of the cholera or the
plague, or were brought in dead from
battle with the fierce hill-tribes. Then,
one day, a bearded monarch, covered
with Jewels reached down and lifted
her from the mud to a shining throne
Il T,,1
and over THE Roof of the World
to be a queen in a strange country.
That little, old woman has reigned, an
absolute monarch, over turbulent
people and carried life and death in
her nod. She has led thousands to
battle and inspired them in the heat
of the conflict with her own indom-
liable courage.
Now the Gar, who holds her lands
and people beneath the lash of the Cos
sack knout, sends her all the money
she needs from his treasury in st.
| Petersburg. And the receives the
| money. spending it right royalty and
playing" that it is tribute from a
conquered prince. So it is, in one
sense, for though she could not stand
against the armies of Russia when
they broke into her territory she con-
| quered from the conqueror, by her
wit and intelligence, most advan-
tageous terms of equalization.
A Queens LOwIy Parents.
The turbulent romance of Alice Cliff
toms life, which is now ending so
peacefully, began away back in 1841,
when the East India Company ruled
India and had an army of it's own.
Her father was an enlisted man in
that army and was stationed at Delhi,
where the Grand Mogul still sat on
q tH%nt,n In hi oil V,f
| ital. He was still Grand Mogul in
name, but to see that he did not try
| to be so in fact John Company" kept
a garrison at Delhi.
Private Clifton lived in the mar
ried mems quarters and his wife was
! the Dinah Shadd of the cantonment,
known all over Delhi for her sprightli-
ness, her good humor and her good
| looks. But Clifton was not jealous of
her. He had no cause to be. With
| all her attractions the wife was a
proper woman and she could send the
presumptuous young recruits to the
right about with a ringing box on the
ear that they remembered. She even
! knew how to snub the native princes
when they leered at her from their
gilded howdahs moving through the
| streets on the backs of their gorgeous
| ly caparisoned elephants; and she like
| wise knew how to make the wild
young officers keep their proper dis
| tance.
Mrs. Clifton was not only beautiful
| and sprightly, she was also very dis
! Greet. When Private Clifton got drunk
she could handle him better than the
whole guard, and she gave him strong
| tea the morning after along with her
| curtain lectures.
Little Alice, her daughter, played
| about with the other soldiers children,
an ordinary looking child, little re-