112 FOREST LIFE AND SPORT IN INDIA 
summers spent at Dhikdla, at Chorgalia, and else- 
where, a solitary Englishman in the centre of an 
inflammable area of hundreds of square miles of 
forest, awaiting reports of any distant smoke during 
the day or of any glow of fire during the night. I 
was becoming tired of the incessant struggle against 
theft by the villagers or contractors, and against 
the corruption of subordinates, of the constant effort 
of vainly teaching in practice how work should be 
done, of the hours spent either in petty details of 
vernacular office-work, or in compiling the voluminous 
schedules with which “red tape” was gradually 
restricting the field-work of the executive officer ; 
and maybe it was personal experience that aroused 
sympathy for my Indian subordinates, who led the 
hardest of lives on the smallest remuneration, so 
that to recruit the superior class of men that was 
required for the efficient working of the State forests 
was becoming yearly more difficult. It was a great 
step gained to be to some extent free from these 
insistent preoccupations, and to be able at least to 
suggest from experience some, perhaps not entirely 
unimportant, improvements. 
I remained in the Central Circle but a few months, 
and then was transferred to Oudh, where the next 
eight years were passed ; and here an attack was at 
once made on the system of departmental exploita- 
tion of the forest, a system whose pernicious effect 
both upon silviculture and upon the staff had 
become so apparent to one intimate with its work- 
ing. A change in a system of management in any 
industry does not, of course, necessarily imply adverse 
criticism of previous authority, and especially is this 
