in sacrifices and offerings upon his shrines, and in donations to his priests.[17] Nor does the robber often dream that he shall be considered a less respectable citizen by the circle in which he moves than the soldier, provided he spends his income as liberally, and discharges all his duties in his relations with them as well; and this he generally does to secure their goodwill, whatever may be the character of his depredations upon distant circles of society and communities.  The man who returned to Oudh, or Rohilkhand, after a campaign under a Pindhari chief, was as well received as one who returned after serving one under Sindhia, Holkar, or Ranjit Singh.  A friend of mine one day asked a leader of a band of ‘dacoits’, or banditti, whether they did not often commit murder.  ‘God forbid’, said he, ’that we should ever commit murder; but, if people choose to oppose us, we, of course, strike and kill; but you do the same.  I hear that there is now a large assemblage of troops in the upper provinces going to take foreign countries; if they are opposed, they will kill people.  We only do the same.’[18] The history of the rise of every nation in the world unhappily bears out the notion that princes are only robbers upon a large scale, till their ambition is curbed by a balance of power among nations.

On the 25th[19] we came on to Dhamela, fourteen miles, over a plain, with the range of sandstone hills on the left, receding from us to the west; and that on the right receding still more to the east.  Here and there were some insulated hills of the same formation rising abruptly from the plain to our right.  All the villages we saw were built upon masses of this sandstone rock, rising abruptly at intervals from the surface of the plain, in horizontal strata.  These hillocks afford the people stone for building, and great facilities for defending themselves against the inroads of freebooters.  There is not, I suppose, in the world a finer stone for building than these sandstone hills afford; and we passed a great many carts carrying them off to distant places in slabs or flags from ten to sixteen feet long, two to three feet wide, and six inches thick.  They are white, with very minute pink spots, and of a texture so very fine that they would be taken for indurated clay on a slight inspection.  The houses of the poorest peasants are here built of this beautiful freestone, which, after two hundred years, looks as if it had been quarried only yesterday.

About three miles from our tents we crossed over the little river Ghorapachhar,[20] flowing over a bed of this sandstone.  The soil all the way very light, and the cultivation scanty and bad.  Except within the enclosures of men’s houses, scarcely a tree to be anywhere seen to give shelter and shade to the weary traveller; and we could find no ground for our camp with a shrub to shelter man or beast.  All are swept away to form gun-carriages for the Gwalior artillery, with a philosophical disregard to the comforts