Now, when communications are so much better than they were, when magnificent roadways and railways reticulate the country in all directions—i.e. in the more settled parts of India—when the system of administration has become more organized and scientific, when every little hamlet can boast its Potshala, or village school; and more especially when a much stricter and better system of inspection and supervision is exercised by European officers, the police, although still far from immaculate, have become a well-trained and important body of officials, whose services are of great value in maintaining order, in assisting in the collection of rural statistics, and in performing most of the ordinary functions which every police force is expected to perform in civilized states.

At the time of which I speak, however, and in the wild Koosee district, where roads were almost unknown, and the only means of communication was on the backs of elephants or by the tedious and cumbrous method of river boats, the police were indeed "a law unto themselves." The head man of a police-station, called a Daroga or Thannadar, generally managed to surround himself with his own kinsmen, or at any rate with men of his own caste and of kindred proclivities; and as Ins post was generally an isolated one, no European inspector being able to visit him at all without his getting timely previous notice from satellites posted on all the leading lines of communication, he was able to lord it over the submissive villagers, with all the arrogance and harshness of a satrap, who is practically irresponsible- for what he does.

He generally contrived to be on good terms with any leading man who would be likely to question his authority or dispute his power; but all the humble cultivators, the industrious artisans, such as fishermen, potters, weavers, and other handicraftsmen, and the patient and thrifty tradesmen of the village, those who dealt in oil, grain, and country produce generally, were often made the victims of his greedy exactions, and were not unfrequently subjected to the most impudent extortions by the swaggering, rapacious robbers of the police thanna.

It was indeed dangerous to question their behests or to dispute their authority.

They were adepts in all the chicanery of the law courts, experts in the manufacture of evidence, practised in getting up frivolous and fictitious charges; and naturally being armed with considerable authority by virtue of their official position, they made the most of it, and so exaggerated their powers that, in the minds of the credulous and ignorant peasantry, they were the very embodiment of English rule, and took good care to foster tins belief by persecuting any unhappy wight who dared to quarrel with them; and in the country districts with which I was best acquainted, much of the opprobrium which was undoubtedly cast upon British rule and associated therewith, in the minds of the simple peasants, was directly traceable to the harsh exactions and rascally practices of these licensed extortioners—the Bengal village police.

Having myself been a victim more than once to their malicious ill-will, because I would not truckle to them, I may be suspected of speaking with some bias or prejudice against them. Any reference, however, to official reports of fifteen or twenty years ago, will show that I am speaking but the bare truth, when I say that the native police were corrupt almost to a man, and that the system, however perfect it may have appeared theoretically, and however difficult it may have been to devise any other suited to the times, was still a vast engine of oppression and terrorism, and was rotten to the core.

I could cite hundreds of instances where the most diabolical tortures were practised on unhappy villagers, who were taken from their homes to the thanna, and there subjected to unheard-of cruelties on purpose to extort money or goods from them. The police were "up to every move" to stifle adverse evidence, and many a mysterious disappearance of a witness who could give evidence against them, has been directly traced to their malign ingenuity.

It was almost hopeless in the conduct of a large factory, where daily and hourly one had to come in contact with the natives in every department of buying and selling, of leasing or exchanging land, of contracting for carriage, for forage, or for service—of arranging forest or fishery or ferry dues—of laying out roads and embankments, of settling villages, digging wells, planting orchards, and all the multifarious complexities of land and village management in the East, without first of all securing by fair means or foul the good-will and assistance of the police. Such was the general idea.

The least troublesome method was to pay the Daroga a recognised blackmail. Do not our own blue-coated truncheon-wielders get their Christmas-box? But the Bengalee "Bobby" was not satisfied with annual vails. For even then his airs and insolence were sometimes so exasperating that some dispute would of a certainty arise; and if once you incurred the hostility of this petty despot, he found a thousand and one ingenious means of irritating and obstructing you in your work, and of exciting you to some overt act which he would twist somehow to his own advantage.

Of course all the criminal classes were at his beck and call. Every budmash in your district would act responsive to his nod. Your hinds might be cut, your cattle stolen, or ploughmen or factory servants maltreated, or your granaries broken into, and even your crops cut by night, and your best village friends looted, and unless you were a man of resource and acted with a high hand, so as to make the police feel that you had a long arm and could light for your own hand, like Hal o' the Wynd, you would find yourself "in sorry case." Indeed, for years before I took charge of Lutchmepore, the police had been allowed to have pretty much their own way in everything. Large sums of money had been paid by the factory to the head man; and the common constables, in their peregrinations, had been accustomed to come into the factory and take goats or fowls or rice or whatever their greedy souls desired.

Having gained my planting experience in Tirhoot, where the planters were a united and powerful body, where road communications were as perfect as they could have been in any of the finest Roman Provinces of olden time, I was not inclined to tamely submit to the insolent exactions of these uniformed scoundrels; and it was not long ere I became fully aware that I was an object of their ill-will and evil machinations.

My example, too, of independence had become contagious. Many of the native land-holders and wealthy residents had become heartsick of the tyranny which was daily practised by these men and their myrmidons, and so when I had soundly thrashed two or three who had been insolent to me, and successfully contested one or two false cases which they had brought against me, the spirit of revolt spread quickly through the villages; and after my first year in Lutchmepore, by kind and generous treatment to all who came in contact with me, by acting with absolute fairness and justice in my adjudications between man and man, and by a liberal spirit of compromise exhibited in my rent assessments and the usual feudal services, I had won the confidence of the vast mass of the village residents, and instead of going, as was their wont, to the thanna with a bribe in their hands to gain the ear of the great man there, they preferred to come to me with their complaints, and I usually settled them in the old-fashioned Indian style by Punckayiet.

It may be interesting to digress for a moment to explain what is meant by the Punckayiet, or panch as it is commonly called. It really is to my mind the perfection of the jury system. The complainant first of all states his case generally —we will take for example a case of trespass, in which he claims damage to his growing crops from a neighbour whose buffaloes may have eaten and trampled a certain portion of the same,

Your first duty as a sort of patriarchal dispenser of justice is to summon the defendant. This is done by a formal letter, a puricanct, taken by one of the factory peons, who receives from the loser in the suit, the sum of two or four annas as a sort of fee for serving the summons. At the stated time defendant and complainant appear at your catch erey, and having stated the nature of the case before the assembled crowd—there always is a crowd around a planter's cutcherry—you ask the defendant to nominate two jurymen; and this he does, his nominations being subject to challenge by the complainant. If the two men he names, who are generally his friends, and as a rule respectable inhabitants of the same village, be not objected to, the complainant then nominates two on his part, to weigh the evidence in his interest. The planter then nominates a fifth, the Panchmee or fifth—Pvnchayiet meaning five jurors—who acts as a sort of president or chairman of this board of five—for that is what it really amounts to—and then the two parties to the suit produce their witnesses, and the whole company retire to the shade of some spreading peepul-tree, and there, the case is heard and decided on its merits. If any one is nominated with a notorious leaning towards either complainant or defendant, the right of challenge is exercised, and at once disposes of him; and each member of the Punchcryiet, being generally as has been said, a resident of the same hamlet, and knowing that at any moment he may be an interested party himself in a similar case, and knowing also every detail of the locality and every point of traditional and local custom, their award is almost certain to he a reasonable and fair one. It is in fact a happy application of the principle of Local Self-Government. The disturbing influence of personal individual interest is effectively eliminated, all the proceedings taking place in the midst of their fellow-villagers; and in this ancient and primitive fashion, the ordinary disputes of an ordinary frontier Indian village are in the majority of cases amicably settled. In the meantime the planter can generally devote his attention to other pressing matters; and when one Pvnchayiet has been formed, it may often happen that all the petty cases of the day are submitted to its adjudication, and very rarely is it the case that there is any appeal from their awards.

Now, we self-complacent Anglo-Saxons are apt to pat ourselves on the back, and laud our wisdom in a great many very questionable institutions which we think are the ne plus ultra of perfection. We talk a good deal of our public spirit; we crow rather loudly about our calmly assumed superiority to these dull clods of Eastern ryots, but I doubt very much if, with all our boasted civilisation and superiority, a village Punchayiet in Northern Purneah is not infinitely superior in the despatch of business, in economy, and in practical utility to our much-vaunted jury system. To return now to our police.

I am about now to give an illustration of their audacity— of their dangerous audacity—their unscrupulousness and their vindictiveness, which at the time it happened made no small stir among the European community, and the effects of which, although I suppress the names, will be still fresh in the memory of many old Indian residents who may read these pages.

Down the river from my outwork Burgammah, and adjoining my Ilaka,—i.e. the territory over which I had jurisdiction,—was another large concern, which had been worked by one of the early French settlers, a fine old hospitable Gaul, who had married, reared a family, and lived in the old Oriental patriarchal style, ruling his numberless villages with a mild, benignant sway, which endeared him to all the army of dependents and the many tenants who paid tribute to the factory in cash or kind.

The old dwelling, with its long-sloping red tiled roof, broad, low verandahs, upon which French windows opened from the dim, cool rooms, hung with heavy, fringed punkahs and crowded with ottomans, luxurious chairs, carved tables, and all the accumulation of quaint, old-fashioned furniture which is so characteristic of a real old factory bungalow in Bengal, spoke of comfort unbounded, hospitality unstinted, and a welcome "ever fresh and fair." Then there were the endless lines of stables, fowl-houses, servants' quarters and nondescript buildings of all kinds, swarming around the big bungalow like a cluster of bees around the queen of the hive; the delightful old pleasaunce of a garden, filled with rare flowering shrubs, or canopied here and there by enormous umbrageous tamarind trees; the masonry conduits bordering the devious paths, and the great cool, dripping well in the centre like a throbbing heart sending the life-giving fluid to the rich beds of plump, luscious vegetables, carefully tended by the old white-turbaned gardener and his numerous bronzed assistants; with its spacious chabutra in front of the stately sweep of the house—the two wings with their white columns flanking the massive bungalow on each side—the kindly, clean chabutra, with its pleasant associations, its stainless amplitude of smooth masonry raised above the ground to keep one from the damp earth—the hospitable, social chabutra, where guests used to sit sipping the old brown sherry, or the iced bael sherbet, or the seductive home-brewed milk-punch, handed by old feudal retainers in their picturesque Oriental garb; while the swish of the hand punkhas behind sent grateful waftings of air across one's heated brow, scattering the delicious aroma of fine old manillas through the ambient air, when all round on the close-trimmed lawn would he seen the numberless four-footed home pets of the place, from stately stag-hound or brown-eyed beagle, down to brindled bull-pup and wiry terrier, constituting the "Sahib's bobery pack." Underneath the shady old mango trees too might be seen eight or ten stately elephants (each attended by his grasscut), slowly masticating their evening meal, and testifying by the lazy swish of trunk and tail, and occasional deep rumble of enjoyment, their unqualified satisfaction with their surroundings.

Such a scene might have been witnessed at any time during the "ancien regime," when the kindly old planter lived amongst his people, and never thought of visiting the far-off "city of palaces" and evil smells on the distant Hoogly, save perhaps once a year or once every two years, when he would take a run down to refurnish his cellars and square up accounts with his agents at the annual auction sales. But times have changed. The fierce competition and the somewhat sordid utilitarian spirit of the age has penetrated to these remote river valleys. No longer now do the patient ryots unhesitatingly acquiesce in the old patriarchal yet autocratic sway. They have learned their rights and are fully aware of their privileges. The rates for indigo are a matter for annual settlement now. Wages of labourers fluctuate as supply and demand fluctuates. The arrangements for the annual carriage of the crop by boat or bullock-cart, is now a matter requiring weeks of wearying diplomacy. Nay more, half your vats may lie empty of indigo unless the rate of your advances comes up to the anything but modest expectations of your needy cultivators. The modern institution of "the strike" is quite acclimatised in Bengal now. Beyond a doubt the position of the native has become ameliorated to an extent which is hardly credible, and which forms one of the brightest tributes to the beneficence of English rule in India, let rabid, revolutionary, red-hot Republicans who malign and misrepresent British rule in the East say what they may. The position of the planter has not been improved in an equal degree or in any ratio at all commensurate with the general advance in material prosperity which has taken place all around him. And thus it is that lie is constantly on the qui vive to take any fresh cultivation wherever he can get a lease of new villages, and he has to make himself acquainted with the necessities and idiosyncracies of all the native landlords and his surrounding peasantry. This branch of planting work is called Zemindaree. The diplomacy involved is called momladeree.

The successful carrying on of a large indigo concern depends largely upon the amount of capital one can use in giving loans to native zemindars, i.e. land-holders. An eight or nine years' lease may be got of certain villages, the planter taking all the risk of collecting the rents, and paying the landed proprietor in a lump sum in advance, and generally also lending him a greater or less amount of rupees without interest for a stated time,

When a lease of a village is thus acquired, a European planter, by his better organisation and superior management, is able to get a better return from the estate than the landlord himself could get under the old lotus-eating, laissez-faire system, which is so characteristic of the languid Oriental— languid and voluptuous, at all events, as the Oriental landed proprietor generally is.

The first thing to be done, then, on the acquisition of such a lease, is generally to measure up the lands, to write up a rent-roll on a proper business system, to see that each tenant has his portion of land properly surveyed; and it is found almost invariably that where a cultivator may have been paying a native landlord for, we will say, four or five beeghas, he is in reality cultivating two or three times that amount. A rectification of the rent-roll thereupon takes place. Instead of paying in cash, the cultivator may commute by agreeing to cultivate a certain amount of indigo at a certain rate. But until you get your village settlement, there is certain to be much heart-burning, many quarrels, and strong opposition— and no wonder—on the part of those who have been for generations accustomed to the easy rule of native landlords, and who are now for the first time brought sharply into conflict with the Western method of land management.

At the time I speak of, this is what was happening. The son of the old planter—an active, energetic, high-spirited young fellow—had taken in a lot of new villages, peopled principally by high-caste Brahmins, and he was measuring the lands with a view of settling the rent-roll and the proportion of indigo each tenant would have to cultivate. The man he had out surveying had several times been molested, the ryots were up in almost open rebellion, and frequent ugly rumours of dangerous complications and possibly even bloodshed had reached my ears. My friend, the young planter, had himself been maltreated in trying to rescue one of his servants who had been measuring some fields in one of the newly-acquired villages. The police, of course, like vultures scenting carrion, had managed to make their services a matter of competition between the contending parties. There was no doubt of it, they had been heavily bribed by the planter to stand by him in the establishment of his rights. But being very nearly every one of them fellow-castemen of the recalcitrant villagers, and being the recipients of very heavy bribes from that side also, it can easily be imagined that their sympathies lay with the men of their own lineage. My neighbour, too, while he stooped to buy their aid, had not tact enough to conceal his contempt for them, and the smouldering embers of their disaffection, as might be naturally expected, soon broke out into an open flame of active opposition, and at the period to which my narrative has now brought us, the whole of the dehaat, i.e. the collection of villages, was in open rebellion against the factory; and the natives were being actively encouraged in their obstruction by the whole body of the police in that part of the district. My poor neighbour had hailed my advent as a welcome diversion, and myself as a valuable ally, and my uncompromising attitude towards the police, and my prompt and summary method of dealing with them, backed as I was by the moral support of all the high English officials, with whom I was on terms of the utmost friendship, and by the no less telling material support of a wealthy proprietary, who had implicit confidence in my judgment and discretion, and who allowed me to make my own estimate of expenditure— all these made my friend look to me for moral support, and it was partly under my advice that he was now working and attempting to measure and settle his new villages. I had quietly at different times sent down native able-bodied fellows from my own dehaat—men I had proved and whom I could trust; and these were quietly working among the villages, trying to win over the best disposed of the tenantry to the side of the factory; and one of the chief weapons they employed was to sow disaffection between many of the villagers who had felt the oppression of the police, and the police themselves.

Of course the police, on their part, knew perfectly well what I was doing, and they had determined to make an example of my fellow planter—show their power—and thus serve a double end in tightening their hold upon the villagers and gratifying their spite against a Sahib at one and the same time. They saw, indeed, that if the factory power was to predominate, their own perquisites and prestige would suffer grievous diminution. But, acting under my advice, my neighbour had managed, by timely concessions and by wise compromises with numbers of the leading men of many of the disaffected villages, to gradually make some headway, and he- would no doubt in time have managed, as I had done, to placate the people and institute a reasonable and fail-system of cultivation which would have been to the mutual benefit of both planter and villager. But this was just what the Darogah and his constables did not want.

Many a black scheme was mooted; many a "vain trick" was tried; many a cunning trap was set; many a plot was concocted; and many a time the whole machinery of chicanery, intrigue, intimidation, and corruption was set in motion to discomfit the hated planter.

And so they schemed and planned and watched for a pretext to draw him away from the dukaat, if even only for a time, so that they might be left free to reconsolidate their waning influence, and foment fresh disaffection against the Sahib. If they got the Sahib away, they agreed they would once more get the wavering villagers back "under their shoe soles," as their proverb has it.

At last in desperation they concocted a devilish plan.

But you shall hear. Let us leave them at present thus.

Just about this time I received khubber—i.e. news—one day that a burra Sahib—i.e. a gentleman of some standing— had arrived at the other side of the Dhaus, and "would I send the elephant across for him?" The Dhaus, as described in a former Chapter, was a reedy, weedy, shallow lake, rank with aquatic vegetation and oozy with slime and fetid mud, which stretched for some miles behind the factory. Under the sweltering sun of summer, it was a very hot-bed of fever, and in the cold months bred chills and agues, and was at all times an uninviting and dangerous plague-spot. Its surface teemed with legions of water-fowl, and round the marge I have often had glorious snipe shooting; but there were many alligators in its sullen recesses, and there was only one or two devious shallow fording-places, where a space was kept clear of weeds, and on which two or three flat-bottomed and very crank dug-outs, or village canoes, plied intermittently.

Wondering what Sahib could possibly have travelled by this little-frequented route to find his way to my isolated "diggings," I hastily ordered out the old "tusker," and watched through my field-glasses, with some curiosity, the scene on the farther side of the Dhaus.

I could see a large palkee, and a goodly group of bearers and banghy-wallahs—that is, pack carriers—squatting around it, and a tall, soldierly-looking man, clad in the ordinary white costume and sola hat of the civilian in the East, stood a little apart, waiting for the elephant, hut I could not recognise the face at the distance. I could see the great elephant floundering along through the weeds and muddy water. The palkee bearers were evidently now being directed by the villagers to go round by the other and better crossing, some two miles northwards; and at last the Sahib and his luggage got placed on the kneeling elephant, which next, slowly uprising, began the return march through the lagoon.

To one situated as I was, scores of leagues from any society, surrounded by a hostile and lawless population for the most part—for, away from my own factory cultivation, the villagers looked with little favour on the white man —years of bad management and downright oppression by former managers, nearly all of them unprincipled natives, and some of them worthless half-castes, had given the factory a bad name, and my readers can imagine the warm glow of welcome and the throb of delight with which I at last recognised in my unexpected visitor Dr. C-, a dear, kind-hearted, jolly old medico, who had at one time been stationed near me in Tirhoot, and who was now high up in the Government medical service. I had been for nearly a year completely buried in these solitudes, and had scarcely seen a white face during that interval.

What a godsend that visit was to me! what it may have saved me from, I will not tell. T was fast losing health at the time, and was in a desponding, listless frame of mind and body; but the advent of the cheery, jovial doctor acted on me like a charm, and for the two or three days he stayed with me, his presence did me good "like a medicine."

Now we did talk over old times and old comrades to he sure!

"What fun we had among the snipe and quail and wild ducks! We went out one day to look for tiger near Nurreya Rajbarra, a famous village for game to the northward, having heard news of a kill in the jowah jungle there; but "stripes" was too wary for us. I may as well describe the day's doings.

Having only the one elephant and not many beaters, the tiger, who must have been "a discreet animal," left his lair betimes, and being seen by a cowherd leisurely lobbing across the sand flats near the river, we were, after considerable delay, put on his tracks—yet quite fresh and easily discernible on the occasional patches of wet sand. He had gone straight through several insignificant streamlets—straggling branches of the great swift rolling Koosee; and that we were close on .the trail was evident from the wet drip on the farther banks, showing where the water had been shaken from his sleek sides as he emerged. With hopes raised and our pace quickened, and throwing out the beaters in the sparse, jungle to form a sort of half-moon formation, we now slowly advanced, fully expecting that the big river would stop the fugitive, and keeping a bright look-out for a shot.

Alas! the tiger was beyond a doubt now "a highly disereet animal."

Tracing the tracks right up to the steep, crumbling edge of the main river, we found ample evidence of a fact which has often been questioned, but which was well known to both the doctor and myself, namely, that tigers take unhesitatingly to water when it suits their purpose, and that they are in fact expert and powerful swimmers. This particular animal, a regular Koosee tiger, had made no more ado in taking to the rapid current than if he had been a buffalo.

In fact, as we gazed at the evidences of Ins fondness for aquatic feats, we were startled by a cry from one of the bearers, "Dehho, Sahiban! Bagh to ooder hai!" (See, see, sirs, the tiger is over there!), and looking across the wide, swiftly rolling stream, sure enough we saw the tiger, a fine, full-grown, splendidly marked male, leisurely making his way among some hummocks and ridges of sand not many hundred yards away.

"Hang it all! I must have a slap at him," said the doctor.

"All right, old man! But it's too far," I responded. Bang went the doctor's ride in reply, and the bullet sent a. pitf-palf of white sand hurtling up some distance behind and to the right of the tiger. This had the immediate effect of accelerating hi« movements somewhat, and presently we saw him leave the ridgy tract, where the shrunken, dry weather channels gleamed in the sun, and scampering up a ragged bank, disappear among some flapping pat air bushes, evidently making straight for some well-known haunt or friendly refuge in the jungle beyond.

The doctor was too excited now to listen to reason. Nothing would satisfy him but to make for the ghaut, and follow up in pursuit at once.

The certainty was that the tiger, fearing pursuit and having been disturbed, would make for some distant lair, and with only one elephant, few beaters, and only half of a short day before us, it was foolish to imagine our quest would be rewarded by success.

However, I had only to please my guest.

Off then we started. Crossed the ghaut. Beat all through the pat air jungle. Got all the Choonee villagers to come and join the line. Made din enough to frighten all the wild beasts within a radius of half-a-dozen miles. Finished, up by shooting a fine hog deer and two hinds for ourselves and servants, and half-a-dozen pigs for the lower caste villagers, and finally got home after dark rather tired, and the doctor not a little disappointed. He had heard so much of the fame of the Lutchmeepore and Fusseah jungles, that he had made sure of getting a tiger-skin to take down country with him. Next day, however, he must depart; and we determined to try and get the Ilmasnugger elephant during the night, and beat down the other side of the Koosee towards Burgammah, where he (the doctor) would rest for the night, if necessary, and then continue his journey by boat towards Calcutta via Bhaugulpore.

All arrangements were accordingly made, and next day making a good start, we enjoyed a pleasant day together, having the two shikar elephants and two small pad elephants, which my Gomastah had succeeded in borrowing, and a good line of beaters with us as well.

We did not see even "sign" of tiger, but made a good general "bag," and reached Burgammah early, found Tom H--, my assistant, to welcome us; and we learned from him that there had been a bit of a row down tin river on the next concern, where those village measurements of which I have before spoken were being proceeded with.

As I wished to see my neighbour, to arrange certain matters about boundaries, establish a neerick, or rate of payment for certain produce, and a common scale of remuneration for such and such services in connection with our factory work, and wished also to cheer him up by the moral support of our visit, we determined, as the doctor had overstayed his time already, and as the tents were not very many miles away and close to the river, to make a start after dinner, it being a bright moonlight night; and we ordered horses to be sent down to a ghat some miles distant, opposite the camp, while we proceeded by boat.

You will now begin to see the drift of all this long preliminary description. The drama is developing.

Just as we are about starting from Burgammah, very different scenes are being enacted down the river.

My neighbour, it seems, had been out shooting during the afternoon, and coming to a seemingly deserted hut, had heard cries as of some one in pain proceeding therefrom.

Calling, and getting no response, he had alighted and looked in, and found there a poor outcast, one of the Bahabs of these jungly river-side villages, evidently in the acute stage of cholera.

As planters, we are all more or less habituated to these scenes, and have little of the fear that natives manifest when the dread cholera is about. This poor creature had evidently been abandoned to her fate. The panic-stricken inhabitants of the lowly thatched dwelling, if indeed she had not been dwelling alone, had left her to perish untended and unsolaced by the presence of any of her own kind.

My friend being in the main, although hot-tempered, yet a humane and tender-hearted man, tried what he could do for the poor thing, and again remounting, galloped back to his camp, took some cholera tincture, and went back to see if haply he could do the dying woman any good. Of course his actions had been watched. He was all the time the object of never-sleeping espionage; and the thanaadar had vigilant observers always noting his slightest movement, if so be they might find "occasion of offence" in him.

When he got back after the lapse of an hour or two, it was eventide, and the wretched woman had gone to her account.

He was alone, as he imagined, and unobserved.

Reverently placing the end of her saree over the poor dead face, he returned to camp, intending to send some domes to bury the body early the next day.

Meantime the thannadar had been apprised by his creatures of all that had occurred, and getting together "some lewd fellows of the baser sort," men he knew he could rely on, to swear black was white if need be and stick to it, he put into execution a scheme which he had quickly matured in his evil bruin, which was no less than to charge the planter with a capital crime.

Accompanied, as was after proved, by several of his Budmash followers, they went and set fire to the hut in which the dead body of the woman lay, and then in pursuance of the vile plot they had concocted, they got a few of the more disaffected villagers to come rushing into the thanna, or police station, to lay a charge of ravishing and murdering the woman against the planter, and that to hide the evidences of his crime he had set fire to the hut.

They acted the dismal drama well. The thannadar went out at once with his men, and took written depositions and statements of all they heard and saw, and by the dawn of day, armed with these, and accompanied by a bevy of suborned witnesses, and even a few perfectly guileless and innocent villagers, whose credulity had been imposed on by the cunningly acted drama and by the hue-and-cry got up, they set out for the residence of the nearest deputy assistant magistrate, who was a native officer also, and whose court was being held some considerable distance off. The subordinate police had taken care to keep any friendly disposed Assamee cultivator out of the way.

All this had been the work of the night. Under cover of the congenial semi-obscurity they had brought their devilish plot to a climax; and we must now look back to see what was transpiring elsewhere.

The doctor, myself, and my assistant started as described from Burgammah in the broad clear light of the moon, and got safely down the river to the ghat, near which was the camp. The doctor looked at his watch, and we found it was just about half-past eight o'clock.

Intending to give D- a pleasant surprise, we left the boatmen with the boat, and proceeded to the tents. We found D- in bed, but soon woke him up. We again noted the time casually. It was about nine now; and very shortly we had our inner wants supplied, and commenced an all-night sitting of a tobacco parliament. He told us all his troubles—he mentioned that cholera had broken out in his dehnat, and incidentally, as quite a common occurrence, told us of the sight he had seen in the evening in the solitary hut. We were quite snug in the cosy tent, and did not, as it happened, see any of the servants; and It being the cold season, they were, as we thought, all too comfortably rolled up in their voluminous cotton garments to take much notice of our quiet confidential talk. As a matter of fact, it subsequently transpired they had all got leave for the night to go to a Bhoj, or feast, in one of the neighbouring villages.

After several hours' pleasant gossip, sundry '*pegs"—in fact, D- took rather more than was wise—and not a few cigars - we judged that our syces would have had time to get down with our horses to the appointed tryst; and after a parting jorum, we accompanied the doctor back to his boat, were poled across stream, got our horses, bade the dear old doctor "bon voyage," and away we cantered back to the outwork, having a spin after a good boar! on the way, in the grey chill dawn, and although he managed to escape our spears, we felt we had earned our breakfast well.

Now it so happened that I had to go into Purueah on legal business, and found a summons awaiting me from my mookhtear, or attorney, and so I was not long in starting, and sent Tom H-- up to the head factory to attend to matters generally till I returned. This took us both away from the immediate vicinity of the plot; and as the doctor was away at Calcutta, and his boatmen were strangers to the neighbourhood, you will perceive how the nefarious plans of the wily and wicked police were favoured by the absence of all those who could have been called by D- as witnesses of his whereabouts daring this eventful night.

Of course the party of conspirators were as equally in ignorance of our midnight visit as we were of their rascally plan.

Here then was a pretty complication.

The deputy magistrate was not a very experienced officer and was burning for distinction and promotion. He only knew D-by repute, and it was no more than a notorious fact that he was a bit of a Zubberdast wallah, that is, a highhanded, rough-and-ready, masterful sort of man. Little wonder then that the magistrate, hearing only the skilfully-arranged evidence, seeing the official and sworn statements of old, experienced police officers, and finding the terrible charge backed up by a host of cleverly-suggested probabilities, came to the conclusion that D-, in a fit of guilty passion or frenzy, had really committed this odious crime, and he accordingly set off with a strong bias against him, and prepared to look only for evidences of guilt in everything that might come under his observation. However, to make a long story short, D-was arrested. The plentiful libations during the night and the tobacco smoke had not improved his appearance, and when the posse of police arrived at the tents and woke him up, he had a wretched bilious headache, and looked in fact bad enough to have really been the murderer and fire raiser they sought to make him.

To be brief, D-had the shrewdness and good sense to hold his tongue. The police got no inkling of the fact that by the most providential arrangement, by the happiest good fortune, a party of Sahibs had spent the greater part of the night with the object of their vindictive hate. Nor did D-seek to enlighten them. The police story was a most plausible one; they backed it up by a marvellous chain of circumstantial evidence, and the false and real were so cunningly and cleverly interwoven, that even the English residents in Bhaugulpore, when they first heard the story as told by the police, were inclined to put the matter down as another of the enormities committed by "those desperate characters the indigo planters"; and so for a time poor D--was looked on as a vile desperado, and a lit subject for the hangman.

As soon as he could, however, he secured the services of a clever barrister from Calcutta. He wanted now "to hoist his underground engineers with their own petard." "In the pit winch they had digged they would find themselves ensnared," and he looked forward to having a respite from the blackguards who had been weaving their vile nets about him for so long. Not a hint or a whisper of his intended defence was allowed to escape. The very police themselves were almost stunned by what seemed the signal and complete success of their odious conspiracy.

H- and the doctor and myself received timely notice to attend when the case was at last called on. The police evidence, was given with fullest amplitude of detail. Every action of D- on the memorable day was sworn to with microscopic fidelity. The horse he rode, its colour, the time of his first visit to the hut; his going in; his coming out again—all were faithfully recorded, and not a word of denial was said. The witnesses were not even cross-examined.

"We quite admit it, your honour;" "I have no questions to ask this witness." Such sentences as these were all that escaped the lips of the leading counsel.

Things looked very black against D-. So well had his secret been kept, that very few even of the Europeans present in court on the first day of the trial but what really believed that at the very least D- had been guilty of some terrible impropriety, if not of the actual offence of which he was charged.

The character of the woman was sworn to. The evidence of several of D-'s servants was twisted so as to make it appear that he was not a paragon of morality, and the accumulated testimony of seemingly trivial details all tended to strengthen the conviction in the minds of his accusers that their triumph was already assured, and that they would succeed in accomplishing the ruin of their enemy.

The interest was intensified during the second day. The thannadar swore to having visited the burning hut along with others whom he named. He described the finding of the charred corpse. A few of the leading disaffected villagers, all active enemies of poor D- swore to having seen him leave the hut and set fire to it.

The cross-examination at this stage was quick, probing, searching, decided, dramatic.

"At what hour was this?"

"About eleven o'clock."

"You are quite sure?"

"Quite sure."

"It was moonlight?"

"Yes."

"You could not be mistaken?"

"Oh no; it was the Sahib sure enough."

They knew him by his dress, by his topee, his white face, and so on. Some very curious contradictory medical evidence as to the appearance of the body, and the utter impossibility of such appearances being possible on a body burned alive, were elicited all confirmatory of D-'s story. The ryots accounted for their presence near the scene by saying they were returning from some feast at the house of a friend, but, being frightened at the Sahib, and indeed on bad terms with him, they hid in the jungle and watched him. Each had his story pat. The very variations and seeming discrepancies all tended only the more firmly to substantiate the main damnatory facts. And no wonder. The whole thing had been rehearsed for weeks. Every scoundrel knew exactly what he had to say, and had heard exactly what every other witness in the conspiracy would say. The tale was coherent in every part. No cross-examination could shake the many facts as thus sworn to. It was abundantly proven to the satisfaction of every disinterested hearer of the second day's evidence that D-was guilty of a cruel murder, and that he had crowned the vileness of his misdeeds on the fatal night by burning the hut in a drunken rage over the wretched victim of his frenzy—between eleven and twelve o'clock. This was the crowning dramatic incident. They all agreed on that point. They were all pinned down to that statement. There was no divergence of opinion as to the precise hour. It was just a little before midnight. They were all sure of that.

And so the third day came round.

Of course you have guessed the denoucement, and can tell the sequel.

First was read D-'s own statement. The skilful disclosure and development of the plot to remove him from the dehaat —the intrigues that were set on foot and maintained against him by the police and the leading cultivators—were depicted in a quiet yet masterly way that carried conviction to every^- mind. Then came certain medical testimony which quite falsified many important statements of the police.

A deep sigh of relief broke from every European in court as each thread of the his conspiracy was deftly laid bare.

And when H-'s evidence and my own and the good old doctor's was given, clearly accounting for every minute of time on the fateful night, from early in the evening, the bubble conspiracy had burst, and as vile and subtle and inhuman a plot as ever was hatched, even by a Bengal thannadar, was exposed in all its wicked hideousness.

Yes, the Bengal police of that day were a nice, gentle, amiable set of officials.

It was lucky for D-that nocturnal visit of his fellow-countrymen. But for that, the diabolical ingenuity of his foes might have triumphed, and he might have been done to death—an ignominious and cruel death—by the false oaths and lying testimony of a pack of ruthless human hyenas.

The chief conspirators got sentences of varying severity; and for a long time the Koosee planters were not much troubled with the plottings and evil devices of the darogajee and his insolent swaggering henchmen the native village police.