giments, as they marched over this road,
free permission to help themselves gratis out of the store-rooms of
these poor men, whom I had set up with a loan from the public
treasury, declaring that it must be the wish and intention of
Government to supply their public officers free of cost; and
consequently that no excuses could be attended to. From that time
shops and shopkeepers have disappeared. Wood for all public officers
and establishments passing this road has ever since, as in former
times, been collected from the surrounding villages gratis, under the
purveyance system, in which all native public officers delight, and
which, I am afraid, is encouraged by European officers, either from
their ignorance or their indolence. They do not like the trouble of
seeing the men paid either for their wood or their labour; and their
head servants of the kitchen or the wardrobe weary and worry them out
of their best resolutions on the subject. They make the poor men sit
aloof by telling them that their master is a tiger before breakfast,
and will eat them if they approach; and they tell their masters that
there is no hope of getting the poor men to come for their money till
they have bathed or taken their breakfast. The latter wait in hopes
that the gentleman will come out or send for them as soon as he has
been tamed by his breakfast; but this meal has put him in good humour
with all the world, and he is now no longer unwilling to trust the
payment of the poor men to his butler, or his _valet de chambre_.
They keep the poor wretches waiting, declaring that they have as yet
received no orders to pay them, till, hungry and weary, in the
afternoon they all walk back to their homes in utter despair of
getting anything.

If, in the meantime, the gentleman comes out, and finds the men, his
servants pacify him by declaring either that they have not yet had
time to carry his orders into effect, that they could not get copper
change for silver rupees, or that they were anxious to collect all
the people together before they paid any, lest they might pay some of
them twice over. It is seldom, however, that he comes among them at
all; he takes it for granted that the people have all been paid; and
passes the charge in the account of his servants, who all get what
these porters ought to have received. Or, perhaps the gentleman may
persuade himself that, if he pays his valet or butler, these
functionaries will never pay the poor men, and t