then existing, they would have answered his call. He shut himself up in the town of Khelat with 2,000 men, his immediate clients and retainers, and his tribesmen from the neighbouring villages, having first sent away his son with Gul Mahomed to the district of Nooshky. General Willshire had only 1,000 bayonets all told, but he did not hesitate to storm, and succeeded in carrying the town with a loss of nearly 200 men. The resistance was not à outrance, but the Belooches lost, nevertheless, four hundred killed, and the Khan himself fell, like a stout Belooch chief, in the forefront of the battle, with his faithful clients round him.

We now hunted up and placed on the throne the son of that rebellious relative, mentioned as having been put to death by Mihrab Khan, after much forbearance, in the early part of his reign. And we left a master with him in the person of a Lieut. Loveday. This officer and the new Khan marched into Nooshky to seize Mihrab Khan's son, and, failing to find him, they treated the Mingul tribe inhabiting that district with much severity. Gul Mahomed and the young Nasseer Khan (Mihrab's son) had meanwhile passed into Mastoong, a district of Sarawan near Quetta, where the people rose in their favor. They were immediately joined in rebellion, by the tribes of Nooshky, Kharan, Mushky, and Baghwan, districts which the new Khan of Khelat and Lieut. Loveday had traversed in their search for Nasseer Khan. This was in June 1840; but in the previous month the Murrees and Boogtees, hitherto Mihrab Khan's most rebellious subjects, had already risen in his son's favor; they had disastrously defeated two British detachments, and had beleaguered a third in the town of Kahun, where they compelled them to surrender, under Captain Brown, admitting them, however, to honorable terms. The Brahoe insurgents first laid siege to our detachment in Quetta, but, failing there, turned their attention in August to Khelat itself, which was surrendered by the new Khan after a weak defence, and young Nasseer Khan again obtained possession of the throne of his ancestors.

The Belooches now proceeded to make a series of attacks upon Lehri, Dadur, and other small posts, and upon detachments of troops marching across the plain of Gundava or through the Bolan pass. Their defeats were, however, frequent, and their advantages slight and temporary. In one of these affairs the body of Lieut. Loveday was recovered, still warm, he having just before been murdered to prevent his release. It was not till November 1840 that we were able to resume the offensive, when General Nott reoccupied Khelat without resistance; Nasseer Khan taking refuge in the hills, whence he maintained his guerilla warfare with some success. He was, however, surprised and utterly

defeated, with the loss of 500 men, in the month of December; after which his followers broke up and fled to their respective hill fortresses. After long negotiations the Belooches were eventually brought to terms, and, in July 1841, Nasseer Khan surrendered, on the understanding that he should eventually be restored to the throne. This was done on the 6th October 1841, by a treaty which, as modified in 1854, is still the basis of our relations with Khelat→ under which we now occupy Quetta and maintain a British Agent at Khelat. By this treaty, moreover, the Khan is bound to keep open the Bolan pass, on account of which, and for freeing the traffic from transit dutes, he receives a subsidy of a lakh of rupees per annum. Nevertheless, though we obtained a right under this treaty to garrison his country and to maintain a British Agent there, still it was 35 years before we considered it requisite to exercise this right.

In October 1841 Hussain Khan, son of the unfortunate Mihrab Khan, acceded to the throne under the style of Nasseer Khan the Second, Gundava and Mastoong, two districts which we had taken away from Khelat, were restored by the treaty then executed, which also provided for the admission of a British Agent, and of British troops whenever considered requisite by our Government, and for fealty to Shah Shuja. In the following year this treaty became obsolete on Shah Shuja's death, and our withdrawal from Cabul. Nasseer Khan then recovered Shâl or Quetta from Kandahar, and held his own without difficulty against the divided councils of the Barukzais. After this our connexion with him entirely ceased till after the annexation of Sind; when the marauding of his Belooch subjects, the Murrees and Boogtees upon the Sind frontier caused Sir Charles Napier to lead an expedition against them in 1845, and to thoroughly efface, by the chastisement which he inflicted, the remembrance of the Murree successes against our detachments in 1841. Sir Charles Napier visited both Kahun and Deyra, the Murree and Boogtee capitals, and made a considerable stay in the country, till both tribes were thoroughly humbled. This is the only method of conducting an expedition against hill tribes, and a hurried. progress like that just conducted by General Macgregor through the Murree country is perfectly without effect. This has been the secret of the failure of so many of our punitive expeditions. If our force is insufficient, as at Ambeyla in 1863, it meets a resistance which places it in serious peril, or, at any rate, detracts greatly from our prestige. If, on the contrary, the force is in ample strength, as in the Black Mountain campaign of 1868, the expedition becomes a mere military promenade; the offending tribes keep carefully out of its way, and it makes no more impres

sion than a ship passing through water. Indeed, the simile often holds good so far that the tribes close in on its wake as it leaves the country. An expedition, like General Macgregor's passing through the Murree hills, leaves no trace. To effect any good, it must stay there as Sir Charles Napier did. It must actually occupy the villages and the fields and the pastures, and keep the recusant inhabitants who have betaken themselves with their women and their flocks and their herds to the recesses of the mountains,—out in the cold, till privations have broken their spirit and they are reduced to submission.

By 1854, however, these tribes had again become troublesome. The fact is that there is no means of subsistence for a population of about 100,000 souls in the savage sterile tract known as the Murree and Boogtee hills. The people are therefore driven to plunder for a livelihood, unless provided with other means of support. In 1847 a regular administration had been established on the Sind border under the well-known General John Jacob, then Major Jacob. He raised a force of Sind horse and Sind rifles, settled himself on the desert frontier at a place he called Jacobabad, dug a canal from the Indus and turned the wilderness into a garden. He established strong outposts along the frontier, and so effectually checked the Belooch inroads that population and cultivation were restored to a tract which the Belooches and drought, between them, had turned into a waste. He also opened relations with Nasseer Khan, with whom he soon became on very friendly terms. His object was to do something for the security of the Bolan pass trade, for the Murrees and Boogtees, unable to plunder safely on the Sind frontier, had redoubled their inroads on the side of the pass, and of the Cutchee of Gundava. Nasseer Khan would probably have, in any case, been ready to meet Jacob half way in this matter, for the Cutchee of Gundava interests all the Brahoes. When Gundava was bestowed upon Mohubbut Khan by Nadir Shah, the gift was one which, under the Brahoi constitution before described, interested the Khan, as chief of the Kamberaris, only. He could never have called out the tribal levies for its defence, and it would soon have been recovered by the Amirs of Sind. So Nasseer Khan the First interested the whole of the Brahois in its defence by allotting to all the tribes shares in this lowland tract. Since then, they are all in the habit of migrating thither in the winter with their flocks and herds, and, consequently, the security of the Cutchee was as important to Nasseer Khan and the heads of the Brahoi confederacy, as to the British Government, which was only interested in the safety of the Bolan trade which traverses that tract. This is the explanation of the readiness with which Nasseer Khan executed a treaty in 1854, whereby he again undertook the lapsed obligations

of the treaty of 1841, for the acceptance of a Resident, and even the admission of British garrisons when desired by us,-in consideration of a subsidy which enabled him to manage the Murrees and Boogtees. He engaged for this to keep them from plundering in our territory, to protect traffic through his own, and to reduce transit duties through the Bolan to eight annas per maund. It is under these obligations that the Government of the Khan receives one lakh of rupees per annum. The first is not onerous for we can and do protect ourselves, but undoubtedly the safety of the Bolan and the Cutchee from Murree raiders is only procurable by the Khan by a happy mixture of force and persuasion, both of which ultimately mean money-in the shape of stipends and jagirs to the Murree chiefs, and posts established in the Murree country.

We before referred to the peculiar institution of Khanehzad officials in the Brahoi polity. We mentioned how one of these, Gul Mahomed Khan, saved Mihrab Khan from death or dethronement in 1827, and that his short-sighted attachment to his master caused the rupture with the British in 1838. How highly his devotion was appreciated, may be judged from Mihrab's intrusting to him his son to be taken to a place of safety, while the Khan himself prepared to resist to the death when the British expedition of 1839 approached the town of Khelat. We have seen how Gul Mahomed fulfilled his trust; how, with his young charge, he evaded Lieutenant Loveday's pursuit through Nooshky and Kharan, and how, leaving that officer to follow a false scent southwards, he turned east and appeared at the head of an insurrection in Mastoong between Quetta and Khelat. It is evident that a man who had been entrusted, so to speak, with the guardianship of Nasseer Khan's boyhood; who had played so prominent a part in the occurrences of 1841; who had mainly contributed to recovering for him Khelat; and who, when General Nott's approach compelled his flight, maintained and kept in heart the tribal risings which, during ten months, so harassed our tenure of Khelat that, in the end of 1841, we restored Nasseer Khan to the throne;-evidently such a man would not consent to sink into the background before the rising influence of General Jacob. Had not Gul Mahomed plunged his country into all the miseries of 1839, had he not brought about his master's death, sooner than let him fall under the influence of the British; sooner than see him in the position which men then despised Shah Shuja for occupying?

As General Jacob's influence became stronger and stronger in Khelat affairs, after 1854, as his ascendancy increased over the intelligent and far-sighted Nasseer Khan, so burned fiercer the old Khanehzad smothered resentment till it conquered his affection for the ward, the almost foster-child of twenty years. At last, in

May 1857, Nasseer Khan died by poison. Gul Mahomed's plans were already laid. Nasseer Khan had a young half-brother, the present Khan Khodadad, a boy of 16, who had never left the zenana, and whom it would be easy for Gul Mahomed to rule by the gratification of his passions. The election of this nominee by a prompt assembly of the Brahoi chiefs shut out the rival claims of a brother and a nephew of Mihrab Khan, and of one Futteh Khan, the brother of our nominee of 1839. It also precluded our interference. Nevertheless, the British had already become indispensable; Khodadad's Khanate would not long have remained unchallenged without our support, which we accordingly extended and secured his throne. In return for this support we claimed the right to advise, and General Jacob's first demand was for the expulsion of Gul Mahomed Khan, who was thus effectually hoisted with his own petard.

Nevertheless, before Gul Mahomed left, he rendered the Khan a service after his own fashion. In 1827, when Mihrab Khan, facing a rising en-masse of the Brahois against his favorite minister Daood Ghilji, had been deserted, by most of his forces and had fallen into the rebels' hands, they actually proceeded to the election of his successor. Gul Mahomed, however, had possession of Khelat, in which town was the family of the Khan elect. He exchanged this for his master's life, and, no sooner had he got Mihrab Khan in safety within the walls, than he closed the gates and bombarded the national assembly, which presently dispersed. In September 1857, the chiefs who had recently elected Khodadad Khan, assembled at Khelat in pursuance of what is, at any rate in the Brahoi polity, a constitutional method of interference in the affairs of State. They wanted, no doubt, to obtain concessions from their nominee. Gul Mahomed, however, closed the gates of the town and bombarded them till they dispersed, and, though he was promptly banished for this, under instructions from the Bombay Government, nevertheless the breach between the Khan and the chief remained irreparable. Indeed, Gul Mahomed himself ere long returned privately to Khelat, and he exercised an evil fluence over Khodadad up to the day of his death-some years later.

From 1857 up to the present time the chiefs of Beloochistan have been more or less in rebellion. In 1858 the mediation of our political agent induced the Chiefs of Sarawan and Jhallawan to march against Mekran, which had thrown off its allegiance to the Khan. On their return they claimed his promise of redress for their grievances; but the Khan remained deaf to the remonstrances of the Bombay Government, and it was at last determined to withdraw from him the British support. Nevertheless, General Jacob determined upon a last effort to render him useful, and persuaded