rule began, to less than one-half of what Sir John Malcolm, and all the other local authorities, and even the worthy Marquis of Hastings himself, under the influence of their opinions, expected it would be.  The land revenues of the native princes of Central India, who reduced their public establishments, which the new order of things seemed to render useless, and thereby diminished the only markets for the raw produce of their lands, have been everywhere falling off in the same proportion; and scarcely one of them now draws two-thirds of the income he drew from the same lands in 1817.

There are in the valley of the Nerbudda districts that yield a great deal more produce every year than either Orchha, Jhansi, or Datiya; and yet, from the want of the same domestic markets, they do not yield one-fourth of the amount of land revenue.  The lands are, however, rated equally high to the assessment, in proportion to their value to the farmers and cultivators.  To enable them to yield a larger revenue to Government, they require to have larger establishments as markets for land produce.  These establishments may be either public, and paid by Government; or they may be private, as manufactories, by which the land produce of these districts would be consumed by people employed in investing the value of their labour in commodities suited to the demand of distant markets, and more valuable than land produce in proportion to their weight and bulk.[7] These are the establishments which Government should exert itself to introduce and foster; since the valley of the Nerbudda, in addition to a soil exceedingly fertile, has in its whole line, from its source to its embouchure, rich beds of coal reposing for the use of future generations, under the sandstone of the Satpura and Vindhya ranges, and beds no less rich of very fine iron.  These advantages have not yet been justly appreciated; but they will be so by and by.[8]

About half-past four in the afternoon of the day we reached Datiya, I had a visit from the Raja, who came in his palankeen, with a very respectable, but not very numerous or noisy, train, and he sat with me about an hour.  My large tents were both pitched parallel to each other, about twenty paces distant, and united to each other at both ends by separate ‘kanats’, or cloth curtains.  My little boy was present, and behaved extremely well in steadily refusing, without even a look from me, a handful of gold mohurs, which the Raja pressed several times upon his acceptance.  I received him at the door of my tent, and supported him upon my arm to his chair, as he cannot walk without some slight assistance, from the affection already mentioned in his leg.  A salute from the guns at his castle announced his departure and return to it.  After the audience, Lieutenant Thomas and I ascended to the summit of a palace of the former Rajas of this state, which stands upon a high rock close inside the eastern gate of the city, whence we could see to the west of the