my attention.  It is sad to see how they have been neglected, and how much waste of valuable timber has ensued.  The natives have a practice of girdling fine trees, at a few feet from the root, in order to strip off as much of the bark as they can conveniently reach.  It is rather a difficult practice to check; but, if we can manage to draw a line between the woods in which the villagers have rights and the public forests, we may impose heavy penalties on the perpetrators of such offences....  The deodar forests cease at the Rotung Pass.  There are no forests of any value in Lahoul and Spitti—­scarcely indeed any wood at all.

    We are now proceeding towards the Kangra Valley, where we expect to
    find tea plantations in a more advanced condition.

[Sidenote:  Illness.]

In this letter, and others of the same date, there is no hint of suffering or of ill-health; but when they were written he had already received the stroke which was to lay him in the grave.  Before the departure of the next mail symptoms had appeared of serious disease of the heart, probably long lurking in his constitution, and now brought out into fatal activity by fatigue and the keen mountain air; and on the 4th of November, having with difficulty reached Dhurmsala, a station in the Kangra Valley,[3] he wrote to Sir Charles Wood in an altered tone, yet still hopeful and cheerful; and intent to the last in India, as at the first in Jamaica, and afterwards in Canada and China, on mitigating so far as lay in his power the evils which man brings on man.

[Sidenote:  Last letter.]

You will not expect (he wrote, in this his last letter) to hear much from me by this mail when you hear how I am situated.  The Hill expedition, of which I gave you some of the details in my last, had an unexpected effect upon me; knocking me down prostrate to begin with, with some symptoms of an anxious character behind, which require looking into.  The nature and extent of the mischief are not sufficiently ascertained yet to enable me to say positively whether my power of doing my duty is likely to be in any degree impaired by what has happened.  But Lady Elgin has brought up from Calcutta the medical man who attended me there, and he arrived this morning; so that a consultation will take place without delay.  Meanwhile I have got over the immediate effects sufficiently to enable me to do such business as comes before me now.  No change has taken place in our plans.  We move rather more slowly, and I have given up the idea of going to Peshawur; but this is rather occasioned by the desire to confer with the Punjab Government, while these affairs on the frontier are in progress, than by my mishap.

I think that the expedition (against the Sitana fanatics) will be a success; and I labour incessantly to urge the necessity of confining its objects to the first intentions.  Plausible reasons for enlarging the scope of such adventures are never wanting; but I shall endeavour to keep this within its limits.

    Lady Elgin is bearing up courageously, under a great pressure of
    labour and anxiety.