round the right or left wrist, according to what they consider to have been the courage he displayed in dying, the red string being the highest honor. During one of our hill-campaigns against them, a sergeant with a handful of British soldiers, mistaking a signal made to him by his captain, attacked a large body of Beloochees in a very inaccessible position: the attack was hopeless, but was made in what was believed to be obedience to orders, and made by all the party with reckless daring. All were killed, and, when the bodies were subsequently recovered by their comrades, round not one, but both the wrists of each Englishman, there was found to be a red string tied, as a mark of Beloochee admiration and esteem for the great courage of an enemy who had not hesitated to attack against such overwhelming odds.

Of all three native armies, that of Bengal is, without doubt, the best in every respect; composed of the finest materials, it is by far the most effective as a military instrument for war purposes. It is larger than the armies of Bombay and Madras put together, and, as a year seldom passes by without some portion of it being engaged on active service, a spirit of warlike adventure is kept alive in it which is as necessary to the health-I might say to the very life of all armies as oxygen is to human existence. For the protection of a portion of the trans-Indus frontier, there is a special little army, called the "Punjaub Frontier Force," which, by an anomalous arrangement, is not under the commander-in-chief, but under the orders of the civil officer administering the Punjaub. It consists of six regiments of cavalry, twelve regiments of infantry, and four batteries of native artillery (three of them provided with mountain-equipment). It is composed of many races, but the bulk of the men are either Sikhs, Punjabee, Mohammedans, Pathans, or Goorkhas, a large proportion coming from small independent communities beyond our borders.

To understand our native army well, one must know something of the characteristics of the races from which it is drawn. I shall, therefore, shortly refer to one or two of the most famous tribes among them.

The Sikhs, whose power we finally overturned in 1849, were originally a religious sect founded by a renegade Mohammedan priest in the fifteenth century. The religion may be generally

described as bearing the same relation to the Hindoo creed that Protestantism does to the Roman Catholic faith; it is a species of reformed Hindooism, although strongly impregnated with a coloring drawn from the Koran. Indeed, Nanak, the founder of it, appears to have endeavored to reconcile the opposing faiths of Moslem and Hindoo in his teaching, and above all things to have preached the unity of the Deity and peace on earth. The persecution to which the Sikhs were subjected by the members of the two great dominant religions drove them, however, to arms, and, when we had our first dealings with them, we found them united into a powerful independent state by the talents and warlike genius of Runjeet Sing, who ruled at Lahore as lord and master of the Punjaub. They are a fine, brave people, and, when we took possession of the country, they were thoroughly inured to war. There every man was armed, and the peasant ploughing in the field carried his sword and shield as he prepared his land for the crop which he never knew who might reap; this he knew, however, that, unless he was prepared manfully to defend it, he had better spare himself the labor of sowing. Our policy since then has been in disarming the people, to whom we afforded protection by an armed police, to wean them from their warlike proclivities, and teach them to become law-abiding citizens. The officers who fought against them at Sobraon, at Ferozshah, etc., bear testimony to their valor, and their discipline as soldiers under us is well known to all who have ever served with them. They are a handsome, smoke-colored (not black) people. By an ordinance of their religion, no man ever cuts his hair, which grows to a considerable length. The soldier coils it up under his turban, but is very fond of combing it out during all moments of leisure. In the same

way he twists up his long beard into a knot under his chin, or ties it up behind his ears over his head. They are very vain of their personal appearance, fond of fine, gorgeous clothing, and take an especial delight in contemplating their fine, regular features in the small looking-glass which each soldier generally carries about him. The Sikh is one of the very very few people who does not smoke, that practice being also forbidden by his creed, but he eats either bang or opium instead; he takes these narcotics in very small quantities, carrying them in the form of

pills in a little box. We enlist them into both our cavalry and infantry; they are not particularly good horsemen, but as footsoldiers they have always had a great reputation in India.

The Afridees, and other Pathan tribes inhabiting the mountains which form our northwestern Indian frontiers, are noble, Mohammedan savages, utterly faithless to all public engagements, but still imbued with a sort of chivalrous hospitality that one cannot help admiring. The Afghans generally are devoted to their country and to their clan, and have what we would call great pride of birth, counting back their descent through a long string of ancestry. They are revengeful and rapacious, brave, hardy, cunning, and prudent. Their system of government is democratic, while their southern neighbors, the Beloochees, lean toward monarchical institutions. Every tribe is divided into numerous clans, each independent, and yielding but faint obedience to its own immediate petty head-man. They are constantly at war, not only one tribe with another, one small village against another, but even one family against its neighbors. Each and all keep a sort of debtor and credit account with their neighbors, life for life. Cold-blooded assassination is not only permitted, but enjoined as an article of faith, and the man who meets another with whom or with whose family his own relations have a blood-feud, is bound, according to the Afghan code of morality, as well as of honor, to slay him forthwith. There is no challenge to mortal combat given, no encounter upon equal conditions of arms, etc., required: if, when concealed, watching for your enemy behind a rock you can shoot him, so much the better. It is by no means uncommon for one of our soldiers to ask his commanding officer for a short furlough, nominally to visit his friends in the hills, but really with a view to killing some neighbor who had rendered himself obnoxious to the sepoy's family, or in order to balance the murder account existing between his village or his relations and some other village or family in the district! Having obtained leave, he starts for the hills, where his people live in independence, beyond our frontier, and, having killed his man, returns to his military duty quite satisfied with himself. With these treacherous barbarians the two highest commandments are, blood for blood, and fire and sword for all kafirs—that is, infidels, or those who are not follow

ers of the Prophet. This spirit of fanaticism, with which they are imbued by their priests, renders it impossible for us to accept them as soldiers in any large numbers; though, strange to say, the greater proportion in each Punjaub regiment has always behaved very well when engaged in the hills against their own kinsmen, so great is the influence of discipline even over these wild savages. Hospitality is a virtue on which they set great store; and while under a man's roof you are safe from injury; but, once left it, your host, who an hour before had declared that all he possessed was yours, that he was your slave, and who had given expression to other figments of purely Eastern conventionality, would without scruple murder you in the most cold-blooded manner for perhaps the old boots you had on, if perchance he had taken a fancy to them. The Pathan mother prays that her son may be a successful robber, and the mulas (priests), whose influence is great among this superstitious people, encourage them in their thieving propensities. Most of these tribes depend principally upon their flocks and herds for support, and, as the duty of guarding and watching them only affords occupation to a few, the Evil Spirit easily obtains a power over the idle but muscular bands of the many, finding employment for them in deeds of violence. Assassination is, according to their notions, quite as noble a species of warfare as any that we practise, and one cannot make them appreciate the distinction between the murder of an individual enemy and his destruction en gros on the field of battle.

They are naturally quick in reply, evincing great acuteness and ingenuity in their discussions on public affairs with our officers, one of whom relates the following story: At a council of Warzeeree head-men one day where he had been presiding, some of those present retired to say their prayers. As they went through their devotions near him, he remarked to a chief, what a pity it was that men so scrupulous about their religious observances should pay so little respect to truth as to think it no shame to deceive him about their crops, their revenue, etc. His immediate reply was: "Yes, that may be so; there was evidently some radical defect in their religious conduct, since God had thought fit to send a governor" (the English officer) "to rule over those who had been independent for so many previous centuries." There are, however, great differences in the disposition and cus

toms and even the morality of these wild races from which we obtain our most hardy sepoys, those known as the "pass Afridees" (coming from the neighborhood of the Kyber) being the most difficult to tame and discipline. As a tribe their boast is that they have seen kings and generals come and go through the pass they call their own, but they have never bowed in allegiance to any. The officers commanding our regiments are naturally anxious to secure the services of such splendid men, trusting to the influence of discipline and to their own individual force of character and power over the native mind to smooth down their traits of licentious independence and to impart to them an honorable regard for the military engagement they entered into upon enlistment. Good faith and unswerving allegiance to the masters whose salt they eat is the highest and most essential virtue in an Eastern soldier, and hundreds of instances might be recorded where those wearing the British uniform have, under the most trying circumstances of temptation, remained loyal and true, although belonging to tribes where public faith is an unknown virtue. The independent tribes immediately bordering the Punjaub frontier can furnish about 170,000 fighting-men, of whom about 20,000 are Beloochees, the remainder of Pathan

race.

The Goorkhas, of whom we have five regiments, are a Nepaulese race, and are easily recognized in India by their Chinese, Tartar-like features, of a flat nose and lidless-looking eyes; they have little or no whiskers, are short in stature, but with stout, squarely-built bodies and sturdy limbs, in fact, eminently suited for hill-warfare. They are Hindoos, and peculiarly sensitive about the killing of their sacred animal to satisfy the beef-eating appetite of the Englishman. Wherever they have been engaged they have earned the admiration of their British comrades; indeed, the regiment that took part in the siege of Delhi won for itself everlasting distinction. Out of its complement of 500 men it lost 319 upon that occasion. No men are fiercer in action; when they kill a man they like to smear their faces and hands with his blood, and in that condition they present a terrible aspect to men unaccustomed to their manners.

The strength of our Indian native army has varied from time to time according to the exigencies of war, but I do not think it