prevalent in its stead.  The taxes, exorbitant as apportioned at the court, were farmed by merciless wretches who made them more exorbitant still, and who collected them, for the most part, at the point of the sword.  Open robbery, deadly brawls and private assassination had become matters of perpetual occurrence.  There was scarcely a day during my tour that I was not in the close vicinity of fatal skirmishes, and that I did not fall in with parties carrying away from them the dead or wounded.  Obviously, this state of affairs could not exist for any very long duration.  The nawab was advised, warned, and then menaced with deposal, provided things were not righted in his dominions, radically and speedily, to the satisfaction of the East India Company.  Harsh measures, equally with mild, were, however, altogether wasted on him.  Personally, he was a groveling debauchee, exhausted alike in mind and in body to sheer imbecility; and his courtiers and counselors were little better than himself.  To anarchy, insurrection seemed inevitably imminent.  It was precluded by annexation, and the kingdom of Oude, not an hour in advance of its deserts, took its place in finished history.

Game of a humbler description I met with in abundance everywhere in Oude, but I had hunted the tiger with the rajah of Benares, and since then had conceived a disdain of feathered things, bustards excepted.  Moreover, I had lately bought a superb double-barreled Swiss rifle, as yet untested in real work.  With inviting jungles constantly within easy reach, not to experiment with this lordly implement on something bigger than a wild pig demanded abnegation beyond my philosophy.  I had no companion, but then I would control my impetuosity, do nothing rash, and, if I could, keep out of the way of temptation.  One day, therefore, breakfast despatched, I shouldered my lovely Switzer, and struck off at random across the open.  Woodland was not far to seek, and before I had been away an hour I was in the heart of a dense jungle.  Ordinary deer and “such-like” I might have shot at will, but I happened to be in an exclusive mood of mind, and was determined to drop a blue-cow, if anything.  But let not my Occidental reader reproach me with having meditated such an atrocity as bovicide.  I have literally translated the Hindoo nil gae, the misleading name given in India to the white-footed antelope, sometimes called also rojh.  At last my slaughterous appetite was gratified, and a blue-cow bore witness to the merit of my rifle, if not to my marksmanship.  It had cost me a tiresome search, and, being a shy animal, much stealthy tracking.  Yet when the beautiful creature lay stretched at my feet it seemed as if I had been guilty of wanton cruelty, and I wished my aim had miscarried, proud as I had just before been of having done execution at what looked to be an impracticably long range.  Not improbably I tried to extenuate my inhumanity by the argument that if I had not killed it somebody else would have done so.  Be this how it may, I could never bring myself to shoot another, though I had many a fair chance.  All things considered, then, I am disposed to strike a balance in my favor.