Army.

As to Giridih itself, the last few miles of train bring up the reek of
the "Black Country." Memory depends on smell. A noseless man is devoid
of sentiment, just as a noseless woman, in this country, must be devoid
of honour. That first breath of the coal should be the breath of the
murky, clouded tract between Yeadon and Dale--or Barnsley, rough and
hospitable Barnsley--or Dewsbury and Batley and the Derby Canal on a
Sunday afternoon when the wheels are still and the young men and maidens
walk stolidly in pairs. Unfortunately, it is nothing more than
Giridih--seven thousand miles away from Home and blessed with a warm and
genial sunshine, soon to turn into something very much worse. The
insanity of the place is visible at the station door. A G. B. T. cart
once married a bathing-machine, and they called the child _tum-tum_. You
who in flannel and Cawnpore harness drive bamboo-carts about up-country
roads, remember that a Giridih _tum-tum_ is painfully pushed by four
men, and must be entered crawling on all-fours, head first. So strange
are the ways of Bengal!

They drive mad horses in Giridih--animals that become hysterical as soon
as the dusk falls and the countryside blazes with the fires of the great
coke ovens. If you expostulate tearfully, they produce another horse, a
raw, red fiend whose ear has to be screwed round and round, and round
and round, before she will by any manner of means consent to start. The
roads carry neat little eighteen-inch trenches at their sides, admirably
adapted to hold the flying wheel. Skirling about this savage land in the
dark, the white population beguile the time by rapturously recounting
past accidents, insisting throughout on the super-equine "steadiness" of
their cattle. Deep and broad and wide is their jovial hospitality; but
somebody--the Tirhoot planters for choice--ought to start a mission to
teach the men of Giridih what to drive. They know _how_, or they would
be severally and separately and many times dead, but they do not, they
do not indeed, know that animals who stand on one hind leg and beckon
with all the rest, or try to pigstick in harness, are not trap-horses
worthy of endearing names, but things to be pole-axed. Their feelings
are hurt when you say this. "Sit tight," say the men of Giridih; "we're
insured! We can't be hurt."

And now with grey hairs, dry mouth, and chattering teeth to the
collieries. The E. I. R. estate, bought or leased in perpetuity from