conducted to a small room, and left there, The roughs paced backward and forward before the door, casting glances at me which I fancied to be sinister.  In a few minutes their chief, a stalwart, brawny biped, swaggered in, twirling his moustaches, clanking his sword, and studying to seem truculent.  He, no less than his men, was at a loss to know what I could have come there for.  So I told him the unvarnished facts of the case, and paused for his reply.  He had none to make.  The latest news from Lucknow he inquired for, indeed, but as I had come from the opposite direction, and withal did not know the latest news of the capital from the stalest, I could contribute nothing to his enlightenment.  Besides my rifle, I had in my belt a pair of loaded pistols.  He desired to look at them, but took in good part enough my objection that I never trusted them in any hands but my own.  We went on talking for a little while, when he called for betel and pan.  This meant that I might go.  I helped myself, took leave and recrossed the drawbridge.  It was a notorious freebooter, a Hindoo Robin Hood, that I had dropped upon.  But why did he not tumble me into his ditch and enrich his armory with my rifle and pistols?  It may be that prudence operated, in his letting me go free, as a check on his lust for a very small gain.  Despite the then disordered condition of the country—­or, in some instances, by very reason of it—­people of his stamp were every here and there called to a summary reckoning.  A bandit would know the haunts of other bandits, and either to conciliate the government or in the hope of reward occasionally betrayed or slew a fellow-outlaw.  While in Oude, one morning just after breakfast I was told there was something to show me in a basket.  The cover was removed, and there I saw sixteen human heads.  Their late proprietors were a famous brigand and his merry men, only looking quite the reverse of merry in the grim ghastliness of decapitation.  I scarcely recovered my appetite before tiffin.

By an odd concurrence of circumstances, when near Fyzabad I was for three days thrown on the hospitality of a wealthy Mohammedan.  Nothing could have exceeded his kindness, but the peculiar nature of the entertainment he gave me may be conjectured when I mention that he had not such a thing as a chair, table, knife, fork or spoon to his name.  Perforce, I had to dine sitting on the floor and with the sole aid of my fingers.  However, I accepted my fate without a murmur, and soon learned to feed after the fashion of Eden as deftly as if I had been bred to it.  Hindoo cookery I could rarely screw up my courage so heroically as to venture upon.  Even the odor of my Calcutta washerman, redolent with the fragrance of castor oil, was too much for my unchastised squeamishness; and as to assafoetida, the favorite condiment of our Aryan cousins, I was so uncatholic as to bring away from India the same aversion to it that I had carried out there.  But a Mohammedan has, with some unimportant