to have anything bought by private contract, but

Colonel E.

in this instance where there was no return present he did. Colonel E. is very angry that it should be paid for, because it was entirely a private present, but I see the value of the rule. It was very good-natured of the Rajah to think of it, and I shall keep my little spice-box with a tender recollection of him, to say nothing of its being a lovely little article, per se.

Saturday, Jan. 18.

I should like to have kept this open till your letter arrived, but G. seems to think the great packet may not come till to-morrow. Still, I think I won't send it. G. may be wrong, everybody is occasionally. In the meantime, I beg to say we have left Gwalior, and I shall have nothing to see, or say, till we get back to Calcutta. So you need hardly read the next journal-it will be so very heavy.

W. and I got up by a wrong gun this morning, one of Scindia's. There is no carriage road, so we all travel separately in tonjauns, or on elephants, or horses, or anyhow; and after I had set off in a great fuss at being so late, G.'s first gun fired. I found W. scrambling along on a pony, under the

same delusion; and we got in here an hour before the others, riding the last six miles as hard as we could. I was glad to be in soon, the weather is so very hot. It has been cold for about three weeks this year.-God bless you! I have been trying to read over my journal and have stuck in it. What very heavy reading it is!

Jan. 20.

I have kept this open for two days, in hopes that the letters would come in, but we have just got all the Galignanis with an anouncement from Bombay, that the Falmouth packet is not come at all; and all your letters are there-and everybody's. It is so disheartening!-We cannot have them for five weeks.

CHAPTER XXV.

Nuddea Gaon, Thursday, Jan. 23, 1840.

THAT missing Falmouth packet still hangs on my mind, and I cannot digest its loss after three days, which must be very unwholesome. We are poking along the narrow roads and ravines of Bundelcund, always afraid every night that the carriage will not be available, and finding every morning, that the Rajah of the day (we live in a course of Rajahs) has widened the old road, or cut a new one, and picked the stones off the hills and thrown them into the holes; and so, somehow, we come along. We have our old friend, Mr. F., who marched with us two years ago, in camp with his Jhansi Rajah, who has met us and been durbared and visited; and a Captain R. with his Rajah in prospect; and Colonel E. still here, because we every now and then step over a mile of Gwalior territory; and Colonel H. also, an old friend, and a sad spectacle of what two more

years in India have done. This morning we came in on elephants because the Duttyah Rajah met G. We arrived, all over dust, but still, as I was telling G., the meeting between Dutty and Dusty was tolerably good. Duttyah's is rather a pretty story. He was picked up a naked, new-born child' under a tree at this place by the GovernorGeneral's agent, who was taking his morning's ride, and who carried the child to the Palace. The old Rajah, who had no children, said it was the gift of God, and that he would adopt him; and an adopted son is, with the natives, as good an heir as any other; but sometimes the English government objects, as territories without an heir fall to the Company. There were ill-natured people who said that the Resident Agent took a paternal interest in the little brown baby, and knew exactly under which tree he was to look for a forsaken child; but I am sure the boy's look quite disproves that calumny. He is more hideously fat than any boy of fourteen I ever saw; a regular well-fed Hindu. The Government never gave a formal consent to the adoption, but his territory is particularly well-managed by the old Prime Minister; and so, upon his consent to pay a certain tribute, he was to be publicly received as Rajah,

to-day, and he and his subjects all mustered in great force, and the old minister was fussing his heart out, to have his fat boy's elephant at G.'s right hand, and looking very proud of his Maharajah. It is very shocking, and I hope it may never be the case in any other country, but we have seen a great many young, petty sovereigns lately and it is extraordinary how like they all are to the old Prime Ministers, belonging to their fathers. It is rather pleasant for this boy to look at the tree where he was found without a rag on, and to think he has a very large territory with a clear income of £140,000 a year. W. O. left us last Monday evening; he did not mean to stop an hour on the road, and it is horrid to think that he is still going shaking on, with the bearers saying 'humph! humph! ha! ha!' which they do without ceasing.

Friday.

Lord Jocelyn, who has been coming across from Bombay to join us through sundry difficulties, writes now from Gwalior, and says that Captain E. is to pass him on to Soonderah, where he hopes we shall have sent horses, &c., and that he will be in camp on Thursday night. His letter did not come till this morning,