shot two or three, at different times, in this place. A good noted cover in a jungle is, as regards wild animals, much the same as a favourite eddy or pool in a stream is for a big trout. As soon as one occupant of the good place is whipped up by a sportsman, another without fail takes its place in the cover.

Two or three times I journeyed from Chicacole to Palcondah, and thence to Gungara, a village about eight miles further on, and pitched my tent close to a hill noted for bears. On these occasions we (for I had two or three companions) used to go into our palanquins after mess, perhaps at about half-past eight in the evening, and our stalwart bearers would take us into Palcondah by daylight the next morning. Our horses having been sent on ahead, we mounted them and rode the rest of the way, arriving in camp at Gungara in good time for breakfast. We had very good sport altogether. We usually beat a good many hills, and turned out several bears. In the middle of one very hot day, I had a tremendous long run after a bear which I had wounded in the leg. My companions were, at the time, busily engaged in arranging one which they had wounded at another hill. My bear had been lying in a small cover, and had been driven, with its broken leg, into the open plain. In spite of being thus crippled, it made play at a good pace for another hill about two miles from where we had turned it out. I ran my best, but could not keep up with the agile and unincumbered natives, who ran along with the wounded bear, throwing sticks and stones at it, and abusing it foully, as is the native custom in like cases, especially when the object of pursuit is in any way crippled, and disabled from doing mischief. I became quite done, and lay under a bush after

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running about a mile, and saw the bear, with his tail of shouting, gesticulating villagers, disappear in the distance.

Another day, we chased a bear into a tangled mass of briars under a hanging cliff. The bear was wounded, and, as it would have been utter madness to have crept in after him, we assaulted him with volleys of stones, but to no purpose. We then fired pistol-shots into the briars, and by great good luck one of the little balls took effect, and out rushed Bruin in great wrath, to die, under our fire, before he was well clear of the thorns.

There were panthers in these hills, but we were not so fortunate as to see any; though one night we were kept awake by a terrible roaring and grunting on a hill near our tent, which, the villagers told us the next morning, was occasioned by a pitched battle between a bear and a panther, for that there were great patches of yellow and also of black fur, and stains of blood, on the hill-side; but both the combatants had beat a retreat, so that we may suppose it to have been a drawn battle.

Certainly bears were wonderfully numerous in this district. In the course of a year we killed considerably over a dozen, and more than once had four of them on foot at one and the same time. The beaters were not highly paid; their pay, in these villages, was a double handful of uncooked rice thrown into the corner of each man's cotton cloth, and a "big pice," a copper coin worth about a halfpenny, thrown after it. The beater tied the rice up in a knot, and the pice in another corner, and went off satisfied.

At the end of 1844, we heard that Chicacole was certainly to be again abandoned as a military station,

and that we were to be moved somewhere early in the coming year. For some reasons we were not sorry; for the regiment had suffered much from "beriberi," and also from cholera. Beriberi is a very intractable and fatal complaint; it is a kind of internal dropsy, and is also accompanied with dropsical swellings and numbness of the limbs. All these external symptoms often disappear, and the sufferer seems to be recovering, but only to drop off very suddenly. Change of air to a man's native village, perhaps in the far south of India, appeared to be the only certain cure, and that only if taken in good time; but it often comes too late. A man would get "sick leave" to his village, and, with the help of a stick, would stump up, pretty strongly, to his officer's quarters for his pay, with his limbs perhaps rather numb, but looking fairly well in the face. "Well, Ramasawmy, how are you? pretty well again?" would be the question, while giving him his pay and passport. "Oh yes, Sahib, I am all right now, and shall see. my friends, and come back quite well." In another hour, the orderly havildar would come and report the man's death. On reaching the lines, he had sat down, and died! Over twenty men died of beriberi during the fifteen months that we were at Chicacole. An invasion of cholera also came, and carried off several men. One smart young sepoy of the light company, by name Khader Khan, was taken ill with this terrible disease. He pulled round, to all appearance, and the second day after he was taken to the hospital I visited him; he sat up in his bed, and said that he was fast recovering. All the peculiar symptoms of cholera had disappeared; the man was apparently in a fair way to recovery. That night, however, head symptoms, a kind of

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delirious reaction, came on, and next day poor Khader Khan was a corpse. This was only one case out of many, where an apparent or partial recovery took place, but ended in this affection of the head and rapid dissolution.

In January 1845 we received the route for Secunderabad, the great military station of the Hyderabad country, and right glad we were to get it; for though, as I have already said, we much enjoyed the sport, &c. at Chicacole, we were anxious for a change to a more healthy place. We were also especially pleased to move to so fine a station as Secunderabad, and to form part of so efficient a force as that which was kept up there, and which was, and still is, the largest in India.

In the latter end of March we left Chicacole, and arrived at Secunderabad towards the end of May. It was a long and hot march, and often in the heat of the day we lay on rugs under the mess-table, finding this to be the coolest place we could pick out. Some days the thermometer was as high in the tent as 115°. Except for the heat, it was a pleasant march; for, though duck and snipe were well nigh gone, we had a good deal of dry shooting-hares, partridge, quail, rock pigeon, &c.

Happily we were free from cholera; though, both before and afterwards, regiments passing along this road were almost decimated by the fell disease. At Sooriapett, half-way between Bezwarrah and Secunderabad, we saw the tombs of Major Blood of the 11th Regiment Native Infantry, and his wife, also of Lieutenant Comyn, of the 43rd Regiment Native Infantry, and several others, all of them victims to cholera within the last very few years. The road

between Bezwarrah and Secunderabad was always infamous for this pestilence.

About thirty miles out of Chicacole, we marched through Vizianagram, a nice little military station; then a place called Toonee, where a famous robber had been hanged in chains many years before. His scull and other bones were yet visible in the iron cage in which he had been gibbeted. After this, we crossed the Godavery river at Rajahmundry, in "bulkets," large double boats, roomy below, and planked over all, so as to form a spacious deck. About 100 men, with their families and baggage, could be accommodated in each of these great ferryboats.

Then we passed Yernagoodum, which I have mentioned in a former page, and here I now killed a young antelope by a lucky snap shot. I put a bullet through the back of its head, immediately upon its starting up, very close to me, in a cotton-field. Then we came to Bezwarrah, on the left bank of the Kistnah river, where is now a large "anicut," or masonry dam, to keep back a great head of water for purposes of irrigation. A similar but larger dam, from which an immense tract of country is irrigated by means of canals and smaller channels, has also been thrown across the Godavery at Rajahmundry, or, rather, at Dowlaishwaram, a few miles above Rajahmundry.

Between Bezwarrah and Secunderabad is much jungle, great and small, but we got no large game. The heat was very great, and the day's march was usually enough to prevent us from caring for long quests after game, and fatiguing tramps over stony and thorny tracts, after we had reached our camp.