river was tainted by the bodies of the camels that had sunk beneath their loads.  The Beloochee freebooters were hovering about, cutting off our couriers, murdering stragglers, carrying off our baggage and our cattle.  Among the rocks of this stupendous defile, our men pitched their tents, and toiled on again day after day, over a wretched road, covered with loose flint-stones, surmounting, at first by a scarcely perceptible ascent, and afterwards by a difficult acclivity, the great Brahoo chain of hills.  The Bolan Pass is nearly sixty miles in length.  The passage was accomplished in six days.  They were days of drear discomfort, but not of danger.  A resolute enemy might have wrought mighty havoc among Cotton’s regiments:  but the enemies with which now they had to contend were the sharp flint-stones, which lamed our cattle; the scanty pasturage, which destroyed them; and the marauding tribes, who carried them off.  The way was strewn with baggage, with abandoned tents and stores; and luxuries, which a few weeks afterwards would have fetched their weight twice counted in rupees, were left to be trampled down by the cattle in the rear, or carried off by the plunderers about them.’

These disagreeables were surmounted; Soojah was installed at Candahar; Ghuznee was captured in gallant style—­when fifty prisoners were hacked to pieces by orders of the shah; Dost Mahomed was beaten wherever he shewed himself; and, finally, our victorious army arrived at Cabool.  Glorious victories are always highly appreciated in England.  The chief actors in this expedition were rewarded with titles of earl, baron, baronet, and knight; and ’all went merry as a marriage-bell.’  Not, however, but that there were moments of misgiving among the conquerors at Cabool.  Dost Mahomed, though beaten, was not subdued, and his repeated small successes made him almost formidable.  But even this was at an end, and the Dost surrendered himself prisoner.

The British force remained in Cabool two years, where officers and men alike misconducted themselves, as soldiers always do in a conquered country.  The exasperation of the natives became more and more manifest:  Akbar Khan, a son of Dost Mahomed, hovered about the country, the evil genius, as it is supposed, of the rising storm; and at length an insurrection broke out in the city.  In this tissue of surprising blunders, perhaps none is more remarkable than the facts, that the general selected to command an army so critically placed was a poor old man, feeble in body and mind, and that the wives and children of many of the officers were present with their husbands and fathers, as if the causeless invasion of a country, and the massacre of thousands of its inhabitants, had been a party of pleasure!  The moment of retreat at length came; snow covered the ground; the dreary passes of Khoord-Cabool were before them; and as they turned their backs upon the city, they were saluted with farewell volleys of musket-bullets.