The Honourable the Court of Directors justly require that requisition for the surrender of offenders by and from British officers and Native States, shall be limited to persons charged with having committed heinous crimes within their respective territories; and that the obligation to surrender such offenders shall be strictly reciprocal, unless, in any special case, there be very strong reason for a departure from the rule.* But some magistrates of districts disregard altogether applications made to them by the sovereign of Oude, through the British Resident, for the arrest of subjects of Oude who have committed the most atrocious robberies and murders in the Oude territory in open day, and in the sight of hundreds; and allow refugees from Oude to collect and keep up gangs of robbers within their own districts, and rob and murder within the Oude territory.  Happily such Magistrates are rare.  Government, in a letter dated the 25th February, 1848, state—­“that it is the duty of the magistrates of our districts bordering on Oude to adopt vigorous measures for preventing the assembling or entertaining of followers by any party, for the purpose of committing acts of violence on the Oude side of the frontier.”

[* See their letter to the Government of India, 27th May 1835.]

December 8, 1849.—­Pukharpoor, a distance of fourteen miles, over a fine plain of good soil, scantily tilled.  For some miles the road lay through Rajah Hurdut Sing’s estate of Bumnootee, which was, with the rest of the district of Bahraetch and Gonda, plundered by Rughbur Sing, during the two years that he held the contract.  We passed through no village or hamlet, but saw some at a distance from the road, with their dwellings of naked mud walls, the abodes of fear and wretchedness; but the plain is well studded with groves and fine single trees, and the crops are good where there are any on the ground.  Under good management, the country would be exceedingly beautiful, and was so until within the last four years.

In the evening I had a long talk with the people of the village, who had assembled round our tents.  Many of them had the goitre; but they told me, that in this and all the villages within twenty miles the disease had, of late years, diminished; that hardly one-quarter of the number that used to suffer from it had now the disease; that the quality of the water must have improved, though they knew not why, as they still drank from the same wells.  These wells must penetrate into some bed of mineral or other substance, which produces this disease of the glands, and may in time exhaust it.  But it is probable, that the number who suffer from this disease has diminished merely with the rest of the population, and that the proportion which the goitered bear to the ungoitered may be still the same.  They told me that they had been plundered of all their stock and moveable property by the terrible scourge, Rughber Sing, during his reign of two years, and could not hope to recover