d but fertile spot was an indigo-planter, near whose bungalow
and factory I encamped for a night. His establishment was of long
standing, but he had no neighbor within many miles, and there was that
about the place which filled me with a sense of utter dreariness and
depression. Hard by the house was a burial-ground, and wholly by that
house it had been peopled with all its many tenants. Saddening were
the brief and almost unvaried histories recorded on its unpretending
monuments. There was a name, and then a date, and then that word at
the bare mention of which there are few old Indians who, as it calls
up memories of bygone shocks and griefs, can refrain from a sickening
shudder--"cholera." Among all who rested there in peace, so far away
from every reminder of childhood and of home, not one had passed the
prime of life. It was easy to picture to one's self the last gloomy
hours of those hapless exiles, stricken down by the fell scourge in
the pride of their strength, and perhaps at the full tide of their
prosperity, with none to succor, and with no hope from the first but
that they must perish. Nor was this quite all. How could their sole
companions, their servants, people of the country, and bound to their
masters by none but the mercenary tie of a hireling, soothe their
dying moments with any genuine sympathy, or supply in the dread
travail of mortality the room of a friend, or even of a
fellow-countryman? This is no baseless sketch of fancy. Familiar facts
dispense with all need to draw on the imagination in outlining the end
of one who meets a destiny like theirs. The planter suddenly finds
himself ill; he rapidly grows worse; a few hours of agony in his
solitude, and all is over. Tidings of the event are carried to the
nearest factory, and then to another and another. Two or three of his
former acquaintances ride over to his bungalow, knock up a rude
coffin, mumble a few sentences about "the resurrection and the life,"
"our dear brother here departed," and "ashes to ashes, dust to dust,"
bury him out of sight, and set up a decent stone over his grave. His
place is filled again in a few weeks or months, and his successor,
regardless of warnings, toils on in the old routine, possibly to share
his miserable fate.

As I have said above, a guard was directed to await me on the Oude
borders. Various, conflicting, and all of them wide of the mark, were
my speculations on its outward and visible form, and the martial
e