17] Nor does the robber often dream that he
shall be considered a less respectable citizen by the circle in which
he moves than the soldier, provided he spends his income as
liberally, and discharges all his duties in his relations with them
as well; and this he generally does to secure their goodwill,
whatever may be the character of his depredations upon distant
circles of society and communities. The man who returned to Oudh, or
Rohilkhand, after a campaign under a Pindhari chief, was as well
received as one who returned after serving one under Sindhia, Holkar,
or Ranjit Singh. A friend of mine one day asked a leader of a band of
'dacoits', or banditti, whether they did not often commit murder.
'God forbid', said he, 'that we should ever commit murder; but, if
people choose to oppose us, we, of course, _strike and kill_; but you
do the same. I hear that there is now a large assemblage of troops in
the upper provinces going to take foreign countries; if they are
opposed, they will kill people. We only do the same.'[18] The history
of the rise of every nation in the world unhappily bears out the
notion that princes are only robbers upon a large scale, till their
ambition is curbed by a balance of power among nations.

On the 25th[19] we came on to Dhamela, fourteen miles, over a plain,
with the range of sandstone hills on the left, receding from us to
the west; and that on the right receding still more to the east. Here
and there were some insulated hills of the same formation rising
abruptly from the plain to our right. All the villages we saw were
built upon masses of this sandstone rock, rising abruptly at
intervals from the surface of the plain, in horizontal strata. These
hillocks afford the people stone for building, and great facilities
for defending themselves against the inroads of freebooters. There is
not, I suppose, in the world a finer stone for building than these
sandstone hills afford; and we passed a great many carts carrying
them off to distant places in slabs or flags from ten to sixteen feet
long, two to three feet wide, and six inches thick. They are white,
with very minute pink spots, and of a texture so very fine that they
would be taken for indurated clay on a slight inspection. The houses
of the poorest peasants are here built of this beautiful freestone,
which, after two hundred years, looks as if it had been quarried only
yesterday.

About three miles from our tents we crossed over the litt