11th Brigade Royal Artillery, at Cawnpore; Left Wing 36th Regiment, Moradabad; Head-Quarters 36th Regiment, Peshawur, from whence ultimately we find he started for Kashmir in the hope of regaining his health, a vain hope as events proved, as he died on the passage home at Malta.  During the course of publication I have received many letters from people who were personally acquainted with Mr. Foster who had met him at home and abroad, from the tone of which letters I gather he was held in the highest possible estimation as a friend, a medical man, and an officer.  I am indebted to the kindness of his father, Dr. John L. Foster, of this island, for being allowed to publish these interesting memorials of one who had now passed “To where beyond these voices there is peace.”

Lizzie A. Freeth. 
Montpellier, Guernsey, Nov. 1873.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE.

This Work requires few prefatory remarks.  I have transcribed without alteration, the Diary that I kept during my visit to Kashmir.  It may seem a strange jumble of description and sentiment, jocularity and seriousness.  During the greater part of each day I enjoyed perfect rest, smoking and thinking—­sometimes soberly, often I fear idly—­and for mere occupation sake, my thoughts were written as they arose.  My mind as influenced by scene or incident, is fully exposed in these pages, and while I have concealed nothing, neither have I added to that which I originally indited.  I am necessarily, and indeed intentionally egotistical, because I write for those who will chiefly value a personal narrative.  Still, I am not ashamed if others see my book, although I would deprecate their criticism by begging them to remember that I only offer it for the perusal of those near and dear to me.

INTRODUCTION.

In the early morning of Midsummer’s-day, 1868, I might have been seen slowly wending my way towards the office of the Deputy Inspector General of Hospitals, at Peshawur—­for the purpose of appearing before the standing Medical Committee of the station, and having an enquiry made concerning the state of my health.  A Dooley followed me lest my strength should prove inadequate to the task of walking a quarter of a mile.  But let me make my description as short as the Committee did their enquiry.  My face, as white as the clothes I wore, told more than my words could, and I was hardly required to recount how that one burning May-day I was called at noon to visit a sick woman, and that while all other Europeans were in their closed and darkened bungalows with punkahs swinging, and thermautidotes blowing cool breezes, I went forth alone on my medical mission to encounter the fierce gaze of the baneful sun, and was overpowered by its fiery influence, or how that I laid a weary month on the sick bed, tormented by day with a never ceasing headache, and by night with a terrible dread,