tide of their prosperity, with none to succor, and with no hope from the first but that they must perish.  Nor was this quite all.  How could their sole companions, their servants, people of the country, and bound to their masters by none but the mercenary tie of a hireling, soothe their dying moments with any genuine sympathy, or supply in the dread travail of mortality the room of a friend, or even of a fellow-countryman?  This is no baseless sketch of fancy.  Familiar facts dispense with all need to draw on the imagination in outlining the end of one who meets a destiny like theirs.  The planter suddenly finds himself ill; he rapidly grows worse; a few hours of agony in his solitude, and all is over.  Tidings of the event are carried to the nearest factory, and then to another and another.  Two or three of his former acquaintances ride over to his bungalow, knock up a rude coffin, mumble a few sentences about “the resurrection and the life,” “our dear brother here departed,” and “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” bury him out of sight, and set up a decent stone over his grave.  His place is filled again in a few weeks or months, and his successor, regardless of warnings, toils on in the old routine, possibly to share his miserable fate.

As I have said above, a guard was directed to await me on the Oude borders.  Various, conflicting, and all of them wide of the mark, were my speculations on its outward and visible form, and the martial equipment by which it was to strike terror in all beholders.  Was it to consist of horse or of foot? and of how many men? and so forth.  The mystery was resolved at the time and place appointed.  A camel—­a picked sample, seemingly, for general ugliness and the vicious way it writhed its mouth—­shambled up to my tent.  Its rider, who in all specialties of repulsiveness tallied with the beast to a hair, impaled a letter on the tip of his spear and handed it down.  It was from the Resident at Lucknow.  In its unpromising bearer I beheld my guard.  If the look of a thorough ruffian, much unwashed, with the spear just mentioned, a matchlock, and an assortment round his waist of what resembled carving-knives and skewers, was to be my sufficient defence in time of trouble, I was well provided for.  However it was to be explained, no harm came to me anywhere on my march.  But my guard, if he looked zealously after my interests, looked full as zealously after his own.  For what I knew he was licensed, as a servant of the state, to billet himself at free quarters on his royal master’s subjects:  at any rate, so he did.  But, greatly to his vexation, I would not hear of his compelling the shopkeepers with whom my butler had daily dealings in buying necessaries for me to provision my camp at their own charge.  The man was for carrying things with a high hand; and at the period of which I am writing to do so was in Oude wellnigh the universal rule.  Justice was fast dying out in the land, and violence already reigned