ll band of three hundred Rajputs, with nothing
but their swords, shields, and spears, to follow him, all of the same
clan and true men. They were bivouacked in a jungle not more than
seven miles from our cantonments at Partabgarh, when Ghulam Husain
marched to attack them with three regiments of infantry, one of
cavalry, and two nine-pounders. He thought he should surprise them,
and contrived so that he should come upon them about daybreak. Sheo
Ratan knew all his plans. He placed one hundred and fifty of his men
in ambuscade at the entrance to the jungle, and kept the other
hundred and fifty by him in the centre. When they had got well in,
the party in ambush rushed upon the rear, while he attacked them in
front. After a short resistance, Ghulam Husain's force took to
flight, leaving five hundred men dead on the field, and their guns
behind them. Ghulam Husain was so ashamed of the drubbing he got that
he bribed all the news-writers[7] within twenty miles of the place to
say nothing about it in their reports to court, and he never made any
report of it himself. A detachment of my regiment passed over the
dead bodies in the course of the day, on their return to cantonments
from detached command, or we should have known nothing about it. It
is true, we heard the firing, but that we heard every day; and I have
seen from my bungalow half a dozen villages in flames, at the same
time, from this species of contest between the Rajput landholders and
the government authorities. Our cantonments were generally full of
the women and children who had been burnt out of house and home.

In Oudh such contests generally begin with the harvests. During the
season of tillage all is quiet; but, when the crops begin to ripen,
the governor begins to rise in his demands for revenue, and the
Rajput landholders and cultivators to sharpen their swords and
burnish their spears. One hundred of them always consider themselves
a match for one thousand of the king's troops in a fair field,
because they have all one heart and soul, while the king's troops
have many.[8]

While the Pawars were ravaging the Jhansi state with their bhumiawat,
a merchant of Sagar had a large convoy of valuable cloths, to the
amount, I think, of forty thousand rupees,[9] intercepted by them on
its way from Mirzapur[10] to Rajputana. I was then at Sagar, and
wrote off to the insurgents to say that they had mistaken one of our
subjects for one of the Jhansi chiefs, and mus