hear the band playing at the Bedford mess, and the sleepy creak and groan of the water-wheel in the garden all day-everlastingly. Here at last was the bungalow and its quiet, dark rooms. The spotless servants, and my own ayah in white and a scarlet coat, and half a dozen ear-, nose-, wrist-, ankle-, and toe-rings and bangles and chains glittering about her, stood salaaming on the doorsteps, welcoming us back to the civilised world. It seems superfluous to enlarge upon a subject on which competent authorities have written; but before I close this chapter I cannot resist adding a short note to the many and forcible lines which have been penned by other writers, of deep regret that Kashmir should ever have been allowed to pass out of British hands. In the earliest days Hindu kings reigned in Kashmir. They were conquered and succeeded by Mohammedan rulers. In 1588 the country fell into the hands of the Moguls. The Afghans gained possession of it in 1756. It was wrested from them by Rangit Singh, the Sikh monarch of the Punjab, in 1819. When the Sikhs in 1846 were defeated by the English, they were unable to pay the one and a half millions sterling which we demanded, and, as equivalent to part of it, they ceded to us a large territory of hill country, which included Kashmir. But our Governor-General, Sir Henry Hardinge, considered it expedient to make over Kashmir to the Jamu chief, securing his friendship, while the British Government was occupied in administering the Punjab. Such is its history. This may have been a diplomatic move, an expedient one, in those turbulent days; and yet it would have been worth a great effort to have kept Kashmir in our hands. As a sanatorium for our troops it would have been invaluable, its climate surpassing any of our hill stations, and besides which there is room. Added to this the country, properly cultivated, would be a great source of revenue, instead of its fertile valleys being wasted on a degraded, lazy, good-for-nothing people. CHAPTER VIII TIGER-SHOOTING Down to the Deccan-A Tiger Shoot-The MarchKhubr-Into Position-A Tree-climbing TigerA Merciful Escape-A Splendid "Great Cat"Heat and Famine-We walk a Tiger up for the First and Last Time-Death of Beater-Return to Civilisation. I' CHAPTER VIII TIGER-SHOOTING TIGER-TIGER! What of the hunting, hunter bold? Brother, the watch was long and cold. What of the quarry ye went to kill? Brother, he crops in the jungle still. Brother, I go to my lair to die. RUDYARD Kipling. F one could look down upon India from a balloon, one would see that it was more or less divided into three regions. The first is the Himalayas, of which we have seen something; the second is the plains, where the last chapter left us; the third is the Deccan, a great three-sided table-land which covers the southern half of India. It slopes upwards from the plains, and its northern wall and buttresses stood in former times as a vast barrier of mountain and jungle between Northern and Southern India, greatly increasing the difficulty of welding the whole into one empire, until at length pierced by road and rail. The eastern and western sides of the Deccan are known as the Ghāts, a name applied to a flight of steps up |