s, in behalf of offenders in whose veracity they are disposed
to place too much confidence.

In one of the cases quoted by Colonel Low in his letter of the 29th
November, 1838, Reotee Barn, a sipahee, claimed a village, which was
awarded to him by the Court, without due inquiry, to avoid further
importunity. The owner in possession would not give it up. A large
force was sent to enforce the award; lives were lost; the real owner
was seized and thrown into gaol, and there died. Reotee Ram had no
right whatever to the village, and he could not retain possession
among such a sturdy peasantry. His commanding officer again appealed
to the Commander-in-Chief, and the case was referred to the Governor-
General and to the Honourable the Court of Directors, and a
voluminous correspondence took place. It was afterwards fully proved,
that the sipahee, Reotee Ram, had never had the slightest ground of
claim to the village; and had been induced to set up one solely at
the instigation of an interested attorney with whom he was to share
the profits.

In another case quoted by Colonel Low in that letter, a pay havildar
of the 58th Regiment complained, jointly with his brother Cheyda,
through the Commander-in-Chief, to the Governor-General, in June
1831, stating, that Rajah Prethee Put had murdered two of his
relations, plundered his house, burnt his title-deeds, cut down five
of his mango-groves, seized seventy-three beegahs of land belonging
to him, of hereditary right, turned all his family out of the
village, including the widows of the two murdered men, and still held
in confinement his relative Teekaram, a sipahee of the Bombay army.
On investigation before the Assistant Resident, Captain Shakespear,
the havildar and Cheyda admitted-first, that Teekaram had rejoined
his regiment before they complained; second, that of the two murdered
men, one had been killed fifty-five years before, and the other
twenty years, and that both had fallen in affrays between
landholders, in which many lives had been lost on both sides; third,
that he had never himself held the lands, and that his father had
been forty years before deprived of them by the father of Cheyda, who
had the best claim to them, and had mortgaged them to a Brahmin, from
whom Prethee Put had taken them for defalcation; fourth, that it was
not his own claim he was urging, but that of Cheyda, who was not his
brother, but the great grandson of his grandfather's brother, and
tha