for to prepare the reinvigorating dinner; not a sign or vestige of any sort of the encampment we had expected to find awaiting us. Then while the light lingered in the western sky,

"And Hope the charmer lingered still behind,"

we fired guns as signals of distress, and listened all in vain for answering shots or shouts from our belated servants. Then we sadly realised that for that night the canopy of heaven must be our sheltering roof, and the game we had shot that day, with any cold tea or other fluid left in our howdah - bottles, our dinner-and possibly our breakfast of the ensuing morn. But, happily, Khooda Buksh, the helpful and imperturbable, was then my shikari (as he was also my valet, factotum, and friend), and with me in this emergency. He it was who procured for us a dinner of some sort—a hotch-potch of venison and junglefowl that we had bagged during our march, and rice and ghee and condiments that he had begged from the mahouts. Good all round as he was, Khooda Buksh did not excel as a cook. He was not the artist to kill himself, after the manner of Vatel, because the fish had not arrived. He would not have been very much put out if nothing edible had appeared for us or himself; but edibles of a sort being procured, he did his best to convert them into a stew, and appetite doing the rest, we fared sumptuously.

Then sitting on elephant-pads we smoked our

pipes, and were filled with contentment, as well as victuals, until it came on to rain; and that rain was not the manifestation of a passing shower, but a steady downpour that might be expected to continue through the night: wherefore we took more pads, and piling one against the other, made a sort of lean-to roof, which kept out a considerable portion of the descending flood, and enabled us to get wet through by imperceptible degrees. So we weathered the night, and when the early morning came, were ready for more of Khooda Buksh's stew-and then the camp came up.

ally.

Not that, in one of these expeditions, anxiety and responsibility ceased with the completion of the commissariat arrangements. The work of that department being seen to, there remained the dayto-day duties of the general in command, the quartermaster-general, and the shikar staff generInformation as to the movements of the enemy (known as khubber) had to be procured from day to day, and marches and countermarches made accordingly; details of a little - explored country had to be studied, in view to discovering practicable routes for carts, &c., fussund to be avoided, and other matters. And when the foe was at hand, strategy had to be exercised in the attack and in cutting off his retreat. Then, too, constant care had to be given to the howdah elephants, to prevent their being incapacitated by sore backs from carrying howdahs. Lastly, discipline had to be rigidly observed, and the orders of

the man in command faithfully and promptly carried out.

It has been my good fortune to control the affairs of more than a dozen of these expeditions without any difficulty arising out of defective discipline, and men who were then commanding or have since commanded regiments or divisions have been amongst the most obedient to orders. Hume (now General Sir Robert Hume) of the 55th and Fane of Fane's Horse were prominent in this respect; as were Peters, who was promoted from the 13th Hussars to command the 4th, and is now a retired general; Gream, commanding officer of the 64th, and now one of the retired general host; and Combe, then a captain of the 21st Hussars, and now general commanding the cavalry at Aldershot. In naming them, I would place on record my lasting remembrance of the loyalty and good-fellowship for which I remain a debtor to them, and others of my companions that are mentioned in these reminiscences.

Would that I could include Sir Henry Tombs, V.C., among those who hunted the Terai with me. He was to have been of my party one year when he was general of the Lucknow Division, and I rode in from camp one day in March to talk over our final arrangements with him. He was then full of life and the idea of tiger - shooting in a month or so, and casually he spoke of going to see a dentist at Meerut about a tooth that was

giving him some trouble. A fortnight later I

heard that it was cancer, not toothache, that had to be dealt with; and when (had all gone as we hoped) he should have been joining me in the Nepal country, he was speeding home to undergo cruel operations and die in the flower of his manhood, when the British world had come to know him as a brilliant soldier, and a splendid career lay immediately before him.

236

CHAPTER IX.

A HUNTING CAMP IN THE TERAI.

SCENERY OF THE TERAI-BEES-HEAT-THIRST-EVENING IN CAMP66 BUFFALO" SMITH-CAMP SCAVENGERS-VULTURES-THE TERAI

SHIKARI-KHOODA BUKSH-THE MAHARAJAH OF BULRAMPOOR-
THACKWELL'S MISADVEN-
TURE-KHOODA BUKSH'S COUR-
ELEPHANT.

HE Nepal Terai came upon one as a delightful contrast to the monotonous succession of mango

groves, unhedged and unfenced fields, and stereotyped villages, that are the prevalent characteristics of the drearily level districts of Oudh. In the Terai wide stretches

of forest were relieved by undulating glades studded with trees of noble outline and foliage, and emerald plains where in this season the cattle grazed. There was at every turn some fresh and unaccustomed beauty to admire in this sylvan