tantial fortress. Eight or ten ruffianly fellows came
about me and wished to know what I wanted. I asked who lived there,
and they informed me, adding an expression of surprise at my putting
such a question. Was their master at home? He was. And could I see
him? They would let me know directly. On this I was conducted to a
small room, and left there, The roughs paced backward and forward
before the door, casting glances at me which I fancied to be sinister.
In a few minutes their chief, a stalwart, brawny biped, swaggered in,
twirling his moustaches, clanking his sword, and studying to seem
truculent. He, no less than his men, was at a loss to know what I
could have come there for. So I told him the unvarnished facts of the
case, and paused for his reply. He had none to make. The latest news
from Lucknow he inquired for, indeed, but as I had come from the
opposite direction, and withal did not know the latest news of the
capital from the stalest, I could contribute nothing to his
enlightenment. Besides my rifle, I had in my belt a pair of loaded
pistols. He desired to look at them, but took in good part enough my
objection that I never trusted them in any hands but my own. We went
on talking for a little while, when he called for betel and pan. This
meant that I might go. I helped myself, took leave and recrossed the
drawbridge. It was a notorious freebooter, a Hindoo Robin Hood, that I
had dropped upon. But why did he not tumble me into his ditch and
enrich his armory with my rifle and pistols? It may be that prudence
operated, in his letting me go free, as a check on his lust for a very
small gain. Despite the then disordered condition of the country--or,
in some instances, by very reason of it--people of his stamp were
every here and there called to a summary reckoning. A bandit would
know the haunts of other bandits, and either to conciliate the
government or in the hope of reward occasionally betrayed or slew a
fellow-outlaw. While in Oude, one morning just after breakfast I was
told there was something to show me in a basket. The cover was
removed, and there I saw sixteen human heads. Their late proprietors
were a famous brigand and his merry men, only looking quite the
reverse of merry in the grim ghastliness of decapitation. I scarcely
recovered my appetite before tiffin.

By an odd concurrence of circumstances, when near Fyzabad I was for
three days thrown on the hospitality of a wealthy Mohammedan. Nothing
co