banks. We set out on foot, but meeting an elephant belonging to our host we thought it as well to secure a first experience of elephant-riding; clambering up by a ladder, then holding on during the terrific convulsion when the good old beast (who had knelt down to facilitate our ascent) suddenly struggled to his feet again. I am not sure that elephant-riding ever becomes altogether a pleasure, but its discomforts vary greatly with the individual animal, some trudging smoothly along, others jolting hatefully. The construction of seats also varies much in the amount of purchase they afford. In the present instance we captured our grizzly hahti1 unawares, and rode him quite in the rough, with only a pad, on which we sat poised in fear and trembling.

Finding our position too precarious to be pleasant, our mahout (driver) bade his charge kneel, and so we clambered down again. The old man was, to our eyes, well-nigh as great a curiosity as his charge; his grey beard, and hair and eyelashes, contrasting so strangely with the dark brown of his loose wrinkled skin.

Having rowed across the river, a fatiguing walk through deep sand at last brought us to the tomb, where, shadowed by grand old trees and fair white flowers, lies the dust of Sooraj-oo-Dowlah, the amiable inventor of the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Superfluous though it may seem to recall that story, I need scarcely say how vividly we realised all its horrid details, here at the tomb of this miscreant, remembering how in the year 1756 this powerful Nawaub, at the head of a large army, attacked the English garrison of three hundred men, who alone defended the "English Factory," which, standing in a marshy jungle, then represented the Calcutta of the present day. After a gallant defence the Factory was captured, and a hundred and forty-six prisoners were immured in a dungeon eighteen feet square, with only one opening for air, and this, in the stifling heat of a burning Indian summer-a space too small for the confinement of ever. one European.

The horrors of that night may be imagined: the piteous cries for mercy; the vain struggles to burst open the door; the prayers

1 Hahti, elephant.

BEGINNING OF ANGLO-INDIAN RULE.

59

for water; the mad despair in which at last the captives fought with and trampled on one another in the agonising effort to reach the window; entreating the guards to fire on them and end their torture. The fiends watched them from the window, and replied to their prayers with shouts of laughter. When the morning broke, and the Nawaub called for the prisoners, the soldiers had to pile up the dead to make way for the living to escape. Only twentythree, more dead than alive, had survived those hours of indescribable horror, and were transferred to wretched sheds and fed with grain and water; some loaded with irons. As to the dead, their burial admitted of no delay, so a great pit was dug into which one hundred and twenty-three bodies were flung, and hidden out of sight.

Those deaths were swiftly avenged, when, in the battle of Plassy, Clive, with a force of three thousand men, utterly routed the Nawaub's army of sixty thousand, who fled, leaving guns, camp baggage, and a legion of cattle to the victors, who thus, in fact, became masters of the land, where, hitherto, they had only dwelt on sufferance.

The Nawaub fled to Rajmahal and sought refuge in a deserted garden, where he was discovered by a Fakeer whom he had deprived of nose and ears! Now was the hour of vengeance. The young tyrant-he was only twenty years of age—was captured and carried back to Moorshedabad, where he was murdered by order of his successor, and his mangled remains were placed on an elephant and exposed throughout the city, till they were finally interred at the spot where we now stood.

The Black Hole long continued in use as part of a warehouse, but was at length demolished. Many other horrible stories are current of Sooraj-oo-Dowlah's amiable propensities; one of these tells how he caused boats to be filled with men and then sank them in mid-stream, that he, sitting in the black marble palace which he had built at Moorshedabad, might watch their drowning agonies.

We returned home by boat, in the clear, beautiful moonlight. But some of the surroundings were by no means in keeping with its calm loveliness. Several dead Hindoos floated past us, bodies of men so abjectly poor that their relatives could not provide fuel

for their funeral pyre. Our boatman ran foul of one, a ghastly object of horror. Vultures innumerable and tall adjutants were quarrelling over every such delicious morsel that drifted ashore, while countless frogs, foxes, jackals, and hyenas blended their voices in one sweet chorus, screaming, croaking, barking, baying, yelling. The piercing shrieks and yells of the latter are about the most unearthly sound imaginable, but one to which we soon got accustomed; a hungry pack of jackals often careering past our very door, or venturing almost into the verandah. Sometimes they do creep in, and hide in the houses, when they are detected by their fox-like smell. They rarely bite unless molested. There are, however, many stories of their carrying away children from the native huts, which indeed is only natural, as so many of the people worship the jackal as an incarnation of the goddess Doorga, who took this form when she carried the infant Krishna across the Jumna. So these worshippers lay food close to, or even within, their houses as an offering to the jackals, whose stone image is among the idols worshipped in Doorga's temple. A Hindoo meeting a jackal bows reverently, and should it pass him on the left hand he hails it as a good omen.

Nevertheless these poor animals are strangely utilised. I was sitting one day among the tall plantains in a garden at Allahabad sketching a picturesque old well, worked by bullocks, and could not think why men were continually coming past with dead pariah dogs and jackals, till I found they were being buried at the roots of the vines to enrich the grapes! That well, by the way, was very near becoming the scene of a little tragedy; for as I rose suddenly to watch a glorious red sunset I kept unconsciously stepping backward, till, literally, I almost felt my foot stayed on the brink, in the very act of stepping down into the horrible blackness-not "the way home" that one would choose! It made me shudder all the evening to think what news that mail might have taken home.

The method of working most of these wells is primitive to a degree. A long bamboo is poised on an upright stage. A leathern skin is attached to one end, and a heavy weight of earth to the other. A native, fully attired in a small pocket

CONNUBIAL QUARRELS.

61

handkerchief and an enormous turban, stands on the stage, so as to weigh down the bamboo with his foot till the skin reaches the well and is filled, when he removes his foot, and the water bag rises and is emptied by another man. In some places a wicker basket lined with clay is used to raise water for irrigation. These wells are a favourite means of suicide among Hindoo women, on the smallest pretext of any domestic quarrel. One magistrate told me that he had been tormented in his district by the multitude of such deaths, being convinced that deliberate murders were being committed at his very door, and yet baffling his powers of detection. At last he succeeded in fishing up one woman alive, and made sure of a full confession. So he promised her protection from all danger if she would betray her murderer, and was considerably taken aback when she indignantly denied having been thrown in, and said she had jumped in of her own free will. When questioned as to her reason for so doing, she replied that her husband had declared she could not bake his chupatties properly, "and did the sahib imagine that any woman would survive such an insult?" We have heard of certain Jewish rabbins who allow divorces on grounds so slight that they suffer an aggrieved husband to put away the wife who has only been so unfortunate as to let his soup be singed; but so deliberate a mode of "cutting off your nose to spite your face" as this Hindoo woman had devised to avenge herself on her lord is certainly rather startling.

New Year's Eve found us encamped in a beautiful jungle at Dewan Serai; the Nawaub Nazim having got up a great wild boar hunt, to which he invited all the ladies in the neighbourhood, providing elephants on which we should accompany the beaters. Only two ladies were able to go, and were rewarded by a most delightful expedition. A long drive through well-wooded country showed us some fine old banyan trees, and sundry temples. We found the camp pitched under a large group of splendid old mango. trees, and had our first experience of those luxurious Indian tents with the invariable black and yellow lining. One large central tent made a first-rate dining-room, where we did ample justice to good fare. Several members of the Calcutta Tent Club were present,

mustering, in all, seventeen spears. The Nawaub himself was detained by illness until the last morning; his son, however, arrived in time for the sport.

Nothing can well be conceived more picturesque than such a camp as this, at night; the dark trees on every side, their glossy leaves reflecting the blue moonlight, and their great boles lighted up by the red camp-fires, around which crouch all manner of native servants, in groups, according to their caste, with (or without flowing drapery and bright turbans. Beyond the white tents of the sahibs are picketed their horses, and in the nullah below the bullocks are drinking; while tall camels and great dark elephants, and bullock-carts, and brilliantly-curtained native carriages (quaint little ekkas) stand about in all directions, guarded by a multitude of camp followers, and more fires. And all this lies in vivid light and shadow, clear as day, only softened and made beautiful by the dreamy moonlight.

We sat at the door of our tents, and watched the death of the old year, and the birth of the new one, in a style to us altogether novel-a foretaste of how we should spend very many of its nights. It was bitterly cold, however, and we were thankful to heap on all our warm clothes, and oh! so glad of thick worsted mittens. From the depths of the forest came the eerie cries of the jackals; and we tried to persuade ourselves that we could distinguish the bark of genuine bona fide wolves, which were said to be alarmingly on the increase in this province of Behar.

Next morning we were off betimes for a genuine day's "pigsticking." It was a very pretty field. Fourteen elephants, each with several riders, formed in line to beat the long grass. Of course the gentlemen were mounted, ready to gallop in pursuit of any boars we started. All the morning we were on poor ground and found only three pigs, two of which were slain—not till one of them had shown fight, and severely cut one of the young Nawaub's horses. No one whose ideas of pigs are limited to the common domestic animal can have any notion of the amount of sport to be obtained from these wild boars of the jungles. Only

1 Gentlemen.