PROMOTION TO COMMAND OF THE GUIDES. 149 



had entered into possession of their new home 

 within the fort which Hodson had worked so hard 

 to get completed. " We have, for India," he writes 

 on October 31, "a very pretty view of the hills 

 and plains around us. Above all, the place seems 

 a very healthy one. To your eye, fresh from 

 England, it would appear desolate from its solitude, 

 and oppressive from the vastness of the scale of 

 scene. A wide plain, without a break or a tree, 

 thirty miles long by fifteen to twenty miles wide, 

 forms our immediate foreground on one side, and 

 an endless mass of mountains on the other." 



They had just heard by telegraph of Lord 

 Raglan's victory over the Russians at the Alma. 

 " We are in an age of wonders. Ten months ago 

 there was not a telegraph in Hindustan, yet the 

 news which reached Bombay on the 27th of this 

 month was printed at Lahore, 1200 miles from the 

 coast, that same afternoon." 



Two of Lord Dalhousie's greatest services to India 

 were a cheap uniform postage and an efficient tele- 

 graph system. The latter, in his own words, "may 

 challenge comparison with any public enterprise 

 which has been carried into execution in recent 

 times among the nations of Europe, or in America 

 itself." 



On November 16 Hodson reports the commence- 

 ment of negotiations between the Indian Grovern- 

 ment and the Amir of Kabul, whom we had let 

 severely alone ever since the failure of his last 

 attempt to regain possession of Peshawar. Hodson 

 looked askance at the new policy which Colonel 

 Herbert Edwardes had been among the first to 

 promote. " One thing," he writes, " is certain, that 



