arty very agreeable. On the 9th, we went
fourteen miles to Bharatpur, over a plain of alluvial, but seemingly
poor, soil, intersected by one low range of sandstone hills running
north-east and south-west. The thick belt of jungle, three miles
wide, with which the chiefs of Bharatpur used to surround their
fortress while they were freebooters, and always liable to be brought
into collision with their neighbours, has been fast diminishing since
the capture of the place by our troops in 1826; and will very soon
disappear altogether, and give place to rich sheets of cultivation,
and happy little village communities. Our tents had been pitched
close outside the Mathura gate, near a small grove of fruit-trees,
which formed the left flank of the last attack on this fortress by
Lord Combermere.[1] Major Godby had been present during the whole
siege; and, as we went round the place in the evening on our
elephants, he pointed out all the points of attack, and told all the
anecdotes of the day that were interesting enough to be remembered
for ten years. We went through the town, out at the opposite gate,
and passed along the line of Lord Lake's attack in 1805.[2] All the
points of his attack were also pointed out to us by our cicerone, an
old officer in the service of the Raja. It happened to be the
anniversary of the first attempt to storm, which was made on the 9th
of January, thirty-one years before. One old officer told us that he
remembered Lord Lake sitting with three other gentlemen on chairs not
more than half a mile from the ramparts of the fort.

The old man thought that the men of those days were quite a different
sort of thing to the men of the present day, as well those who
defended, as those who attacked the fort; and, if the truth must be
told, he thought that the European lords and gentlemen had fallen off
in the same scale as the rest.

'But', said the old man, 'all these things are matter of destiny and
providence. Upon that very bastion (pointing to the right point of
Lord Lake's attack) stood a large twenty-four pounder, which was
loaded and discharged three times by supernatural agency during one
of your attacks--not a living soul was near it.' We all smiled,
incredulous; and the old man offered to bring a score of witnesses to
the fact, men of unquestionable veracity. The left point of Lord
Lake's attack was the Baldeo bastion, so called alter Baldeo Singh,
the second son of the then reigning chief, Ranjit