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are seldom wanting sportsmen among the civil or military officers, who hear the news with pleasure, and make haste to rid them of the nuisance. A good shot, on an elephant, seldom fails, with perfect safety to himself, to destroy as many of these terrible animals as he falls in with.

In the afternoon Mr. Boulderson took me a drive in his buggy. This is a vehicle in which all Anglo-Indians delight, and certainly its hood is a great advantage, by enabling them to pay visits, and even to travel, under a far hotter sun than would otherwise be endurable. The country, however, in this neighbourhood, and every where except in the imme diate vicinity of the principal stations, is strangely unfavourable for such vehicles. Our drive was over ploughed fields, and soon terminated by a small, but to us, impassable, ravine. We had, however, a first view of the range of the Himalaya, indistinctly seen through the haze, but not so indistinctly as to conceal the general form of the mountains. The nearer hills are blue, and in outline and tints resemble pretty closely, at this distance, those which close in the vale of Clwyd. Above these rose, what might, in the present unfavourable atmosphere, have been taken for clouds, had not their seat been so stationary and their outline so harsh and pyramidical, the patriarchs of the continent, perhaps the surviving ruins of a former world, white and glistening as alabaster, and even at this distance of, probably, 150 miles, towering above the nearer and secondary range, as much as these last (though said to be 7600 feet high) are above the plain on which we were standing. I felt intense delight and awe in looking on them, but the pleasure lasted not many minutes, the clouds closed in again, as on the fairy castle of St. John, and left us but the former gray cold horizon, girding in the green plain of Rohilcund, and broken only by scattered tufts of peepul and mangoe-trees.

November 19.This morning we went seven coss to Sheeshghur, over a worse cultivated country than the last day's stage, and one which had, evidently, suffered much from want of rain. The heavy and happy fall which had given plenty to Oude and the Dooab did not extend here, and except in a few places, where irrigation had been used, the rice and Indian corn had generally failed, and the wheat and barley were looking very ill. Where there are rivers or streams, irrigation is practised industriously and successfully; but there are few wells, and they do not seem, as in the Dooab and Oude, to draw water from them by oxen for their fields. The rain which falls is, in most seasons, said to be sufficient.

On leaving our encampment we forded the river Bhagool,

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and afterwards, once or twice, fell in, during our march, with its windings. At last, soon after the sun rose, and just as we had reached a small rising ground, the mist_rolled away and showed us again the Himalaya, distinct and dark, with the glorious icy mountains, towering in a clear blue sky, above the nearer range. There were four of these, the names of three of which Mr. Boulderson knew, Bhadrinath, Kedar Nath, and the peak above the source of the Ganges, the Meru of Hindoo fable. The fourth, to the extreme right, he did not know, and I could not find it in Arrowsmith's map. Bhadrinath, he told me, is reckoned the highest. From hence, however, it is not the most conspicuous of the four. That we saw the snowy peaks at all, considering their distance, and that mountains twice as high as Snowdon intervened, is wonderful. I need hardly say that I wished for my wife to share the sight with me. But I thought of Tan dah and the Terrai, and felt, on recollection, that I should have probably been in considerable uneasiness, if she and the children had been to pass the intervening inhospitable country.

Sheeshghur is a poor village, on a trifling elevation which is conspicuous in this level country. It has a ruinous fort on its summit, and altogether, with the great surrounding flat and the blue hills behind it, put me in mind of some views of Rhydlan. The Clwydian chain, indeed, is not crowned by such noble pinnacles as Bhadrinath and Gangotree, but I could not help feeling now, and I felt it still more when I began to attempt to commit the prospect to paper, that the awe and wonder which I experienced were of a very com plex character, and greatly detached from the simple act of vision. The eye is, by itself, and without some objects to form a comparison, unable to judge of such heights at such a distance. Carneth Llewellyn and Snowdon, at certain times in the year, make, really, as good a picture as the mountains now before me; and the reason that I am so much more impressed with the present view, is partly the myste rious idea of awful and inaccessible remoteness attached to the Indian Caucasus, the centre of earth,

"Its Altar, and its cradle, and its throne;"

and still more the knowledge derived from books, that the objects now before me are really among the greatest earthly works of the Almighty Creator's hands, the highest spots below the moon-and out-topping, by many hundred feet, the summits of Cotopasi and Khimborazo.

I had two sets of visiters to-day: the first were a set of Natch-women, accompanied by a man, who beat a small

drum, and a naked boy, who seemed the son of the elder of the three females. The whole party were of the "cunja," or gipsy caste, with all its most striking peculiarities. The women would have been good-looking, had not their noses been distorted, and their ears lengthened by the weighty ornaments suspended from them. Their arms, legs, and necks were loaded with rings and chains, and their dress was as tawdrily fine as their poverty would admit of. The man and boy were, in all respects but clothing, the same description of animal which might steal a hen or open a gate for a traveller in the neighbourhood of Norwood. I gave them a trifle, but declined seeing their performance. The second set of visiters were an old Raja and three sons and a grandson, who were introduced by Mr. Boulderson. Their ancestors had possessed a considerable territory, but the Patan wars had lowered them down to simple, and far from wealthy, landowners, whose main dependence is, at present, on a pension of 4,000 s. rupees a year, allowed them by the Company. The Raja was a homely, cheerful old man, with white beard and unusually fair complexion; and excepting the few swords and shields in his train, neither he nor his sons had much which differed from the English idea of respectable yeomen. Their visit was not long: I gave them, at taking leave, lavender-water by way of pawn and attar; and the old Raja (on account of the supposed sanctity of my character, in which I heartily wished I more accorded with their ideas of me) desired me to lay my hand on his back and that of his sons, and bless them. His business with Mr. Boulderson chiefly respected an embankment which he wished to make on the neighbouring small river Kullee, in order to throw the water over many acres of land, some of which we had crossed, which where now altogether dependant on rain, and sometimes, as in the present year, unproductive. The embankment had been commenced, but was opposed by the Nawab of Rampoor, a descendant of Ali Mohammed Khan already mentioned, and who still holds a very produc tive jaghire, as large as an English county, extending from the neighbourhood of Moradabad almost to the foot of these mountains. He maintained that the proposed work would drown some of his villages. We went in the afternoon to see the place; and I endeavoured, by the help of a very rude. extempore levelling instrument, made of the elephant-ladder, four bamboos, and a weighted string, to ascertain the real course which the water would take, and how high the dam might be raised without danger of mischief. My apparatus, rude as it was, was viewed with much wonder and reverence by these simple people; and as I kept on the safe

side, I hope I did some good, or, at least, no harm by my advice to them. The ryuts of the Nawab, indeed, as well as the Raja and his sons, professed themselves perfectly satisfied with the line proposed.

Mr. Boulderson said he was sorry to learn from the Raja that he did not consider the unhealthy season of the Terrai as yet quite over. He therefore proposed that we should make a long march of above twenty miles the following day to Ruderpoor, in order to be as short a time in the dangerous country as possible. I was, for several reasons, of a different opinion. My people and sepoys had already had two long marches through very bad and fatiguing roads. That to Ruderpoor was described as worse than any which we had yet seen. As Ruderpoor is reckoned only a shade less dangerous than Tendah, to halt there on the Sunday would be impossible, and we should have on that day also a march of twenty-five miles through the forest to Bamoury. Besides my reluctance to subject the men to so great fatigue on such a day, I had always understood that lassitude was among the most powerfully predisposing causes to fever, and I could not think, without uneasiness, of any of them being tired out and lagging behind in so horrible a country. The direct way to Ruderpoor lay through the Nawab's territory; and Manpoor, the intervening station, was by no means a desirable one, either from its air or the mutinous character of its inhabitants. A little to the right, however, was a village named Kulleanpoor, within the Company's border, and at least not more unwholesome than its neighbours. The distance was eight or nine short coss, which would do nobody any harm. There would remain a stage of six or seven miles to Ruderpoor on Sunday, which might be done without any nightly travelling, and leave both men and cattle fresh next morning for our long march to the mountains. For Europeans there was in either place little risk; our warm clothing, warm tents, elevated bedsteads, moscheto nets, (a known preservative against malaria,) and our port wine, would probably be sufficient safeguards; but for the poor fellows who sleep on the ground, and are as careless of themselves as children, it behoved me to take thought; and Mr. Boulderson, for the reasons which I have mentioned, agreed with me in the opinion that Kulleanpoor should be our next stage.

I asked Mr. Boulderson if it were true that the monkeys forsook these woods during the unwholesome months. He answered that not the monkeys only, but every thing which had the breath of life instinctively deserts them, from the beginning of April to October. The tigers go up to the hills, the antelopes and wild hogs make incursions into the cultiva

fed plain; and those persons, such as dak-bearers, or military officers, who are obliged to traverse the forest in the intervening months, agree that not so much as a bird can be seen or heard in the frightful solitude. Yet during the time of the heaviest rains, while the water falls in torrents and the cloudy sky tends to prevent evaporation from the ground, the forest may be passed with tolerable safety. It is in the extreme heat, and immediately after the rains have ceased, in May, the latter end of August, and the early part of September, that it is most deadly. In October the animals return; by the latter end of that month the wood-cutters and the cowmen again venture, though cautiously. From the middle of November to March, troops pass and repass, and with common precaution no risk is usually apprehended.

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November 20.-The way to Kulleanpoor turned out exceedingly bad, rugged, and intersected by nullahs and gools," or canals for the purpose of irrigation; so that our baggage, though sent off at five in the evening of the 19th, did not arrive till five the next morning, and both camel-drivers and sepoys complained a good deal. It turned out, however, that they had been themselves partly to blame, in not, according to my directions, taking a guide, and consesequently losing their way. The country is by no means ill cultivated thus far, but as we approach the forest it gradually grows marshy and unwholesome, and the whole horizon, at some little distance, was wrapped in a thick white mist which Mr. Boulderson called "Essence of Owl," the native name for the malaria fever. The villages which we passed were singularly wretched, though there is no want of materials for building, and the rate of land is very low. It seems, however, as if the annual ague and fever took away all energy from the inhabitants, and prevented their adopting those simple means of dry and well-raised dwellings, and sufficient clothing, which would go far to secure their health and life. They are a very ugly and miserable race of human beings, with large heads and particularly prominent ears, flat noses, tumid bellies, slender limbs, and sallow complexions, and have scarcely any garments but a blanket of black wool. Most of them have matchlocks, swords, and shields, however, and Mr. Boulderson pointed out two villages near which we passed, which had last year a deadly feud, ending in a sort of pitched battle, in which nine men were killed and several wounded. It was necessary to despatch a corps of sepoys to the spot to settle the quarrel, by bringing a few of the ringleaders on both sides to justice. So expert are men, even when most wretched, in finding out ways and means of mutually increasing their misery!