FROM SOLDIER TO CIVILIAN. 103 



Simla. You can come down with Lumsden or 

 otherwise as you and he think best. ... If you 

 come down, the sooner the better, for I have a 

 special bit of service in this direction for the Guides 

 which must come off soon. . . . You never sent me 

 the memorandum of services durins: the war." ^ 



About the middle of August Hodson had reached 

 Lahore and entered on the duties of Assistant to 

 the Commissioner, Charles B. Saunders. He had 

 hardly set to work when he came in for another 

 sharp attack of fever. " I am about again," he 

 writes on September 3, " but not able to work. 

 Sir H. Lawrence is very unwell : I fear that his 

 constitution is utterly broken down, and that he 

 will either have to go away from India for two 

 years or more, or that another hot season will kill 

 him. He is ten years older in every respect than 

 he was during our Kashmir trip in 1846." 



With resfard to the nature and extent of his 

 duties the new Assistant Commissioner had not 

 much to learn. They combined, in his own words, 

 "judicial, police, magisterial, and revenue work. 

 A goodly number of new ideas, is it not ? Happily 

 I have tried all under the old regime, and have 

 only to learn the new system and official slang. 

 It will be a good line eventually. At present I 

 get less pay than with the Guides since their 

 augmentation." 



It was not entirely of his own choice that Hodson 

 had entered upon his new career. " To tell the 

 truth," he wrote on September 24, " I had much 

 rather have remained with the Guides, — a more 

 independent and very far pleasanter life, and I 



^ Letters supplied by Miss Hodson. 



