The Amil has taken the contract at the rate of last year, as the Government had sanctioned no increase to the nankar, and he pleads in vain for a remission in the rate, which he pledged himself to pay, or an increase of means to enforce payment among so turbulent and refractory a body of landholders.  As I have before mentioned, the Oude Government has this season issued an order to all revenue collectors to refuse to recognise any increase to the nankar that has been made since the year A.D. 1814, or Fusilee 1222, when Saadut Allee died, as none has since that year received the sanction of Government, though the nankar has been more than doubled within that period in the manner above described by local authorities.  The increase to the nankar, and the alienation in rent-free tenure of lands liable to assessment in 1814 by local authorities and influential persons at Court, are supposed to amount in all Oude to forty lacs of rupees a-year.  None of them have been formally recognised by the Court, but a great part of them has been tacitly acquiesced in by the minister and Dewan for the time being.  They cannot enforce the order for reverting to the nankar of 1814, and if they attempt to do so the whole country will be in disorder.  Indeed, the minister knows his own weakness too well to think seriously of ever making such an attempt.  The seer lands are those which the landholders and their families till themselves, or by means of their servants or hired cultivators.  Generally they are not entered at all in the rent-rolls; and when they are entered, it is at less rates than are paid for the other lands.  The difference between the no rent, or less rates, and the full rates is part of their perquisites.  These lands are generally shared out among the members of the family as hereditary possessions.

January 23, 1850.—­Behta, ten miles, over a plain of fine muteear soil.  The greater part of the surface is, however, covered by a low palas jungle.  The jungle remains, because no one will venture to lay out his capital in rooting up the trees and shrubs, and bringing the land under culture where the fruits of his industry, and his own life and those of his family, would be so very insecure, and because the powerful landholders around require the jungles to run to when in arms against the Government officers, as they commonly are.  The land under this jungle is as rich in natural powers as that in tillage; and nothing can be finer than the crops in the cultivated parts, particularly in those immediately around villages.  There are numerous large trees in the jungles, but the fine peepul and banyan trees are torn to pieces for the use of the elephants and camels of the establishments of the local officers, and for the cows, bullocks, and buffaloes of the peasantry.  The cows and buffaloes are said to give greater quantities of milk when fed on the leaves of these trees than when fed on anything else available in the dry season; but the milk is said to be of inferior quality.  All the cultivated and peopled parts are beautifully studded with single trees and groves.