They have each a fort, or stronghold, mounting five or six guns, and trained bands of armed and brave men of five or six hundred, which they augment, as occasion requires, by Gohars, or auxiliary bands from their friends.

Hurdut Sing, of Bondee, alias Bumnootee, held an estate for which he paid one hundred and eighty-two thousand (1,82,000) rupees a year to Government; but he was driven, out of it in 1846-47, by Rughbur Sing, the contractor, who, by rapacity and outrage, drove off the greater part of the cultivators, and so desolated the estate that it could not now be made to yield thirty thousand (30,000) rupees a-year.  The Raja has ever since resided with a few followers in an island in the Ghagra.  He has never openly resisted or defied the Government, but is said to be sullen, and a bad paymaster.  He still holds the estate in its desolate condition.

The people of Nawabgunge drink the water of wells, close to the bank of the river, and often the water of the river itself, and say that they never suffer from it; but that a good many people in several villages, along the same bank, have the goitre to a very distressing degree.

December 6, 1849.—­Halted at Byram-ghat, in order to enable all our people and things to come up.  One of our elephants nearly lost his life yesterday in the quick-sands of the river.  Capt.  Weston rode out yesterday close to Bhitolee, the little fort of Rajah Gorbuksh Sing, who came out in a litter and told him, that he would come to me to-day at noon, and clear himself of the charges brought against him of rescuing and harbouring robbers, and refusing to pay the Government demand.  He had been suffering severely from fever for fifteen days.

Karamut Allee complains that his father, Busharut Allee, had been driven out from the purgunnahs of Nawabgunge and Sidhore, by Ghoolum Huzrut and his associates, who had several times attacked and plundered the town of Nawabgunge, our second stage, and a great many other villages around, from which they had driven off all the cultivators and stock, in order to appropriate them to themselves, and augment their landed estates; that they had cut down all the groves of mango-trees planted by the rightful proprietors and their ancestors, in order to remove all local ties; and murdered or maimed all cultivators who presumed to till any of the lands without their permission, that Busharut Allee had held the contract for the land revenue of the purgunnah for twenty years, and paid punctually one hundred and thirty-five thousand (1,35,000) rupees a-year to the treasury, till about four years ago, when Ghoolam Huzrut commenced this system of spoliation and seizure, since which time the purgunnah had been declining, and could not now yield seventy thousand (70,000) rupees to the treasury; that his family had held many villages in hereditary right for many generations, within the purgunnah, but that all had, been or were being seized by this lawless freebooter and his associates.