immigration, and give the exiles, whom they find hard-working industrious tenants, long leases on easy terms.  The new-comers are very independent, and strenuously resist any encroachment on what they consider their rights.  If an attempt is made to raise their rent, even equitably, the land having increased in value, they will resist the attempt ‘tooth and nail,’ and take every advantage the law affords to oppose it.  They are very fond of litigation, and are mostly able to afford the expense of a lawsuit.  I generally found it answer better to call them together and reason quietly with them, submitting any point in dispute to an arbitration of parties mutually selected.

Nearly all the rivers in Nepaul are formed principally from the melting of the snow on the higher ranges.  A vast body of water descends annually into the plains from the natural surface drainage of the country, but the melting of the snows is the main source of the river system.  Many of the hill streams, and it is particularly observable at some seasons in the Koosee, have a regular daily rise and fall.  In the early morning you can often ford a branch of the river, which by midday has become a swiftly-rolling torrent, filling the channel from bank to bank.  The water is intensely cold, and few or no fish are to be found in the mountain streams of Nepaul.  When the Nepaulese come down to the plains on business, pleasure, or pilgrimage their great treat is a mighty banquet of fish.  For two or three annas a fish of several pounds weight can easily be purchased.  They revel on this unwonted fare, eating to repletion, and very frequently making themselves ill in consequence.  When Jung Bahadur came down through Chumparun to attend the durbar of the lamented Earl Mayo, cholera broke out in his camp, brought on simply by the enormous quantities of fish, often not very fresh or wholesome, which his guards and camp followers consumed.

Large quantities of dried fish are sent up to Nepaul, and exchanged for rice and other grain, or horns, hides, and blankets.  The fish-drying is done very simply in the sun.  It is generally left till it is half putrid and taints the air for miles.  The sweltering, half-rotting mass, packed in filthy bags, and slung on ponies or bullocks, is sent over the frontier to some village bazaar in Nepaul.  The track of a consignment of this horrible filth can be recognised from very far away.  The perfume hovers on the road, and as you are riding up and get the first sniff of the putrid odour, you know at once that the Nepaulese market is being recruited by a fresh accession of very stale fish.  If the taste is at all equal to the smell, the rankest witches broth ever brewed in reeking cauldron would probably be preferable.  Over the frontier there seems to be few roads, merely bullock tracks.  Most of the transporting of goods is done by bullocks, and intercommunication must be slow and costly.  I believe that near Katmandoo, the capital, the roads and bridges are good, and kept in tolerable repair.  There is an arsenal where they manufacture modern munitions of war.  Their soldiers are well disciplined, fairly well equipped, and form excellent fighting material.