WAITING FOR BETTER TIMES. 179 



too strong to allow the most ordinary justice to be 

 done me as yet, though public feeling (as far as 

 there is any such thing in India) has been mani- 

 fested most strongly and in a very gratifying 

 manner in my favour. What the result may be 

 eventually it is impossible to foresee ! My ruin in 

 the meantime is absolute and complete. Two years 

 ago I was in the most envied position on the frontier 

 — commanding a distinguished regiment, which I 

 had helped to raise and form, and which I had 

 myself instructed, and governing an important 

 district ; and I was in receipt of a hardly earned 

 (but honourably earned) income of £1200 a-year. 

 I am now a regimental subaltern on £300, or rather 

 £250, a-year ! And all this without fault of mine, 

 but simply from the bitter enmity of one man 

 whose official position gave him the long -sought 

 opjDortunity of gratifying his rage. 



"However, I trust I am too much of a soldier to 

 permit myself to be subdued by reverses, or to sit 

 down and fret over the irremediable past. There is 

 much to do — some good, I trust, to be effected — and 

 much to be learnt in this regiment, and I am not 

 sorry, per se, to have the opportunity of being more 

 amongst English soldiers than I have been of late 

 years. I do not say, however, that I do not feel the 

 reverse most keenly. It is a great comfort, though, 

 to feel that I have nothing to be ashamed of, nothing 

 to look back upon I would wish concealed from my 

 friends or the world. Of course I admit that there 

 are many things in which I might with present ex- 

 perience have acted differently, perhaps more wisely 

 and more well. To which of us does it happen on 

 reviewing his past life to say, ' Were I to live over 



