202 RIFLE AND ROMANCE 



Not long ago I happened to be quartered at one of those 

 little old-world stations yet to be found in India, which 

 would have been quite the dullest spot in the whole of this 

 vast peninsula to which a poor exile could be condemned, 

 had it not been for the sport obtainable in its neighbour- 

 hood. 



To the southward stretched a great flat and fertile plain, 

 the home of countless antelope, and here and there afford- 

 ing some pig-sticking ; while to the north there rose, sweep- 

 ing from east to west as far as the eye could range, the 

 wall-like ramparts of a mountain system in and beyond 

 which, in the old days, lay a famous big game country. 

 The fastnesses of this region were not outside the limits 

 of a day's ride, while many of its wildest glens could be 

 reached within three or four hours. 



Famine, native guns, and the proximity of the canton- 

 ment are, each to a certain extent, responsible for a con- 

 siderable diminution in the numbers of the fauna of those 

 hills, which, like the heavy forests that once protected 

 them, have receded to the more inaccessible nooks of 

 hidden glens. 



The traveller, passing up the old route taken by 

 Wellesley's force on its victorious dash from Argaon on 

 Gawalgarh, will now disturb no wild-eyed bison. The 

 mountain bull, through whose very bamboo-grown retreats 

 a British army then forced its arduous passage, has long 

 since withdrawn himself and the steadily contracting 

 numbers of his kind deeper and deeper into the forest 

 depths. Other game animals have followed his example. 

 But there is still a little shikar to be had. At intervals 

 which are becoming fewer and farther between red- 

 letter days dawn, reminiscences of what one might have 

 expected long ago in those days when khubber was not 

 scarce, and the Briton quaffed his " brandy pawnee " in 

 the grateful shade of the golden-blossomed " pagoda tree." 

 So, in the hope that an account of some of the good days 



