India are not quite so genial in the early morning as they were "Dalhousie Consule." He gives his first impressions of Government House. "I find the house superb, the furniture disgraceful; an A.D.C.'s bed absolutely broke down to the ground with him the other day from sheer age; the plate and table equipage very poor." Noblemen with large private means could supply these deficiencies. Dalhousie could not; and the grand seigneur in him rose against the indignity. Until recent times the Indian Treasury was niggardly in these matters. Rulers of provinces were meanly housed, given furniture fit only for a bonfire, and made to pay rent for it.

The Dalhousies found little joy in Calcutta. In February Lord Dalhousie had begun to find it warm, "an incipient frying-pan" he calls it, as people told him it was beginning to be hot.

His first impression of the work is that it "is severe for the climate, but nothing to choke 8 home Minister at home." Later on he revises his opinion: "The subjects are so various and so new, and the anxiety in new work is so wearing, that occasionally I get desperately exhausted." He was determined to master everything, and having done that he would see his way to devolve more upon others. One Indian condition he hailed with joy,"The absence of Parliament is a celestial fact." His successors of to-day have less cause for rejoicing. Better, perhaps, to sit in Westminster than to be a puppet at the end of a

wire, with Parliament playing the tune and the Secretary of State pulling the string.

The revolt of Moolraj, and the bursting of the storm in the Punjab, soon called him to stirring scenes. December 1848 sees the young Governor-General full of the fire of battle hurrying on his camp from Umballa to the front. There is no time to "dwell on a camp life, strange as it is on the scale of a G.-G.'s.” "Honour and arms are his theme. He is in his element seeing to the despatch of troops and supplies, backing up Lord Gough in every way possible, but at the same time interfering and advising the old warrior in a manner that would have astonished Lord Kitchener. In May 1849 his acquaintance with Simla made an unlucky beginning, as he was "blessed with an influenza -a genuine Piccadilly influenza -ever since I came here." Neither the Governor-General nor Lady Dalhousie were strong. They could not bear up against the depressing climate of Simla in the rains. The conditions of life and the society of the place at that time were not such as to cheer them. "The place," he tells Sir George Couper, "has been greatly overrated in climate and everything else." Afterwards he found Simla better than he first thought it. At Muhassoo he found life more enjoyable, as indeed it is to this day. Some gossip had reported to Couper that Lady Dalhousie hated India and tried to make her husband

Lord

dislike it. Dalhousie denies this with warmth.

"To say that she likes India would be to assert a paradox. What woman of rank and position in her own country can by possibility do otherwise than dislike à banishment which separates her from her children during the bud and blossom of their youth - which separates her from all her friends-puts her in a position where she can see little of me, and where she has heavy ceremonial duties to perform, which she is physically unable to bear without bodily suffering, severe and frequent. She has a thousand times rebuked me when I was storming abuse of the country, and dissuaded me when I said, as I often have said, that nothing should induce me to remain here."

The fact is, neither of these and enduring spirits

noble were

endowed with

to come. cutta an

bodies

fitted to support the Indian climate. "I was broken down in health when I started," writes Dalhousie in the same letter, "and had no business I landed in Calinvalid, almost a cripple. During all 1848 I was never one hour free from pain, and often attacked by the illnesses of India." India is a country where men work hard and where dure and suffer most. Yet India has never seen a man who has lived a life of more endless labour, anxiety, and thought than the

women en

great Governor-General, or a lady who has more earnestly tried to do her duty and help her husband in spite of illness than his wife.

"Moreover," he exclaims in_another place, "I am alone! How can a Governor-General ever have a friend? You may be easy and

companionable with the few you choose to select-but there you arethe Lord Sahib Bahaudur always-the golden image which Nebuchadnezzar the king set up. I am sure," he goes on with a humour he lets loose now and again, "if the latter potentate had been a sensible man, he would on the offer of restoration have cut his kingdom while he cut his nails, and would have preferred thereafter to purge and live cleanly as a noble man should do. I don't deny, therefore, that I detest the country and many of the people in it. I don't proclaim it; but I don't doubt that my face does not conceal it from those I have to deal with."

This must be taken as the outpouring of a man crushed between overwork and ill

health. Nevertheless his high courage maintained him, his sense of duty compelled him, and his ambition lured him on.

With the coming of the cold season Dalhousie's health improved. He marched through much of the Punjab cheered by the signs already evident of peace and good government, improved revenue, and progress in roads and canals. He began to enjoy life.

We

"The day after I left Mooltan, from a spot about twenty miles down the river, I made a dash over to Dhera Ghazee Khan on the other side of the Indus. Tents were sent midway across the Sind Saugor Doab. set off-Fane and I-by moonlight, at four in the morning, on elephants,went twelve miles, and then got our horses. I travelled that day more than sixty miles, and rode fifty of them-inspected a regiment, received all sorts of people, crossed four streams of the Indus, and did not reach the tents till it was pitch dark, at eight o'clock at night."

A wild ride over wild country, "free from all the cumbersome parade that kettles a Governor

General's tail wherever he goes." Could he have had more forays of this kind it had been well for him. Going down the Indus to Hyderabad, where he made acquaintance with the Amirs and chief men of Scinde, he reached Karachi, where he took one of the Company's ships to Bombay. After a pleasant week there they sailed down the Malabar Coast, looked at Galle, were six days crossing to Sumatra, three more to Singapore, and thence, stopping at Malacca and Penang and Moulmein, came back to Calcutta, having passed from the extreme western to the eastern boundary of the Indian empire.

Dalhousie had been away from his Council for many months. He had begun to realise that the Governor-General is, by the construction of the Government, "the Key, Chain, and Mainspring of the machine," and that, "if important measures of internal improvement are to be carried, his place is with his Council." Indeed, to one conversant with the Government of India in the present day, it is difficult to imagine how business could have been carried on while Lord Dalhousie was away, and when there telegraph or railway,- more especially as he was not too ready to allow the Council much freedom of action. However, political considerations, he says, must carry him northwards. Lady Dalhousie left in March for Simla, and the Governor-General followed in April, none the better for his stay in Calcutta. On the 16th

was no

May he writes from Muhassoo: "I am rather in the dolefuls this post, having a sick house, from myself to the collie on the rug." Lady Dalhousie's health began to break again. But in June things mended with them both, and at the end of the month they were in camp a fortnight's march from Simla.

"We arrived here yesterday, after a fortnight's travel. The track, for it hardly could be called a path, was desperate, and for women terrific. It is simply the native track, neither engineered nor formed. Flights of stairs formed of loose stones are the chief ascents, and sometimes stairs of trunks of trees. In rounding the corners of the precipices I have seen the track not 3 feet wide, and the Sutlej 3000 feet or so sheer below you! My Lady was carried in a thing they call a dandy, like a hammock slung on a single pole. It is carried on two men's shoulders, and long rope - traces are attached by which they pull up the ascents where the zigzags are long enough to allow it, and lower you down the steep descents on the other side. Near to everal hundred yards long, and as this place you cross a face of rock many high, by continuous flights of these steps, and rude wooden platforms supported on pegs of wood driven into the clefts of the cliffs. The descent is direct to the river, I should say nearly 5000 feet below! It was very grand but really funky. We passed from thence into the valley situated between the ranges of the snowy mountains, but filled with luxuriant vineyards of the finest grapes, with orchards of apricots, and with pears, peaches, walnuts, and chestnuts. The Raldung, one of the eternal snows, rises to 23,000 feet in height opposite to us,-the avalanches are daily audible, roaring down its sides, and yet the valley is covered with rich corn crops, and adorned with forests of deodars high up, and green hardwood trees below. It is a dictions, and on first sight appears strange mixture of beautiful contracharming. I shall be able to tell you

more about it next month. The mail will be only 46 hours from Simla, and I can get there in four days, so that I am ready if wanted. On the road I saw the deodars in glory. I measured a good many in one grove in which we were encamped,-several were between 18 and 21 feet in girth, and one veteran measured 36 feet round."

They remained there amid magnificent scenery, and in a peace which a Viceroy of the present day cannot hope to enjoy for more than a week or two, until late in September. Chini was This sojourn in Chini probably the happiest and most peaceful time in the eight years of Lord Dalhousie's reign.

The following months were full of interesting travel and work: work of all kinds-not merely, or even chiefly, at the desk.

To march leisurely through the newly annexed Punjab, accompanied by the men who were making it under his direction, and to observe how order and prosperity were being created, was as great a joy as a man could have. In November he writes from the camp at Umritsir

"I have passed through the Jullunder Doab, our acquisition in 1846. It is a garden-was always more peaceful than the other side of the Beas, and is now quite tranquil. I then crossed into the Manjha, and went with a flying camp over all the upper part, visiting the point where I propose a great canal of irrigation, to which I hope and believe the Court [of Directors] will assent. The country is very beautiful,-already fertile, and at present the Sikhs, whose peculiar tract it is, are quite submissive."

At Amritsur he visited the temple, "the Holy of Holies

The

of the Gooroo Nanuk." priests themselves sent the Governor-General a pair of grand blue velvet boots with soles of cloth, so that he might visit the shrine without taking off his boots. We may excuse him if he exults.

"Five years ago an European hardly dared stand in the streets of Umritsir. That day, at their own

request, an English G.-G. stood on their very holiest ground, surrounded by crowds of Grunthees-the very Akalees (desperate, murderous fanatics) salaaming to the ground before him."

Lady Dalhousie was by his side.

It is impossible to quote more than a few of the interesting passages in these letters of this period. Lord Dalhousie and his wife were under canvas from the beginning of November 1850 until the 12th of May 1851. He tells Sir George Couper

"We arrived here [Simla] on 12th. My Lady tired and thin but very well. We made only one halt from Attok to this place, and then only because the cattle knocked up. We made 52 marches (18 of them in the hills) in 50 days, the marches averaging 10 miles, and crossed six large rivers-four of the six unbridged-and one of them without boats even, which we crossed on inflated buffalo-skins!"

India." It is amusing to find the most noble the GovernorGeneral talking about his new road to Simla, his project to extend it to the Chinese frontier, the reception in camp of the Maharaja of Puttiala and the Cis-Sutlej chiefs, and his controversy with Sir Charles Napier, in the same breath with which he discusses and amends the terms of agreement proposed to be made with this illustrious Mr Halford. Sir Charles Napier proved a sad thorn in the flesh to Dalhousie, but the controversy has its amusing side also.

"Sir Charles says that my hostility and jealousy were visible from the beginning; for in the very first interview he had with me, I said to him that I had been told from England that he would encroach upon my authority, and that I added, I would take d-d good care he should not do so. This is a fair sample of Sir C. Napier's system. There is just enough truth in this to prevent my being able to say it is wholly untrue from beginning to end; and yet it is absolutely untrue in its substance, and in the inference to which it was intended to give rise.

"Everybody reading it is meant to believe, and many will believe, that I met Sir C. N. in a spirit of hostility, that I told him I knew he would try to encroach on my power, and that I coarsely asserted, with an oath, that I would prevent him. The very reverse of all this is the fact.

"I had a perfect recollection of the conversation to which he referred. But I did not need to trust to my memory. For many years past, like my father before me, I have been in the habit of making notes as to public events and public men, and public affairs connected with myself; and on referring to my paper, I found a very full note of the very conversation. Far from being hostile, I was friendly, confidential, frank, and (as his story

I

would prove) familiar in excess. told him that things could only go pulling well together, and that I felt on fully as they ought to do by our sure we should do so. Plenty people had told him, probably (I said), that I was all for politicals and would put him that such was not the case; that down the military branch. I assured I never wished to put a political near a general when the latter was thought capable (as I have since proved in regard to Pegu); and that he would he asked for him. On the other hand never see a political near him unless (I said), plenty people had told me he would try to usurp civil power, and would be troublesome. I told him I nothing of the kind; and I added, was perfectly certain he would do

laughing,' You know that if you did, I should take very good care to prevent you. At the close of the note I said, 'I do seriously believe he has no more idea of attempting to interfere with me in my civil functions than I have of taking direct command of the army.'

"This note is dated 5th August 1849. Its testimony is unimpeachable. The evidence could not be got up, for it is dated four years ago. It was not prepared in expectation of the hostility on his part, and which it is now called forth to meet; for the concluding words, which I have quoted above, and its whole tenor, show that I anticipated no hostility. I was a fool for believing as I did; but the belief itself and the whole conversation prove that, far from being hostile, I was most friendly both in language and feeling; and that, far from telling him I expected encroachments, I told him I was quite certain he would attempt none, and that I did sincerely believe he would attempt none. Whether I said 'd-d good care' or not I don't know. I believe I did not; the whole note does not use the epithet. I, unfortunately, have used the word too often to be able to say I did not use it then. I believe sincerely I did not. But at any rate, the question is not whether I was profane towards God, but whether I was hostile towards Sir C. Napier. The whole conversation shows I was not hostile. Nay, the very 'double d' tends to