In the three following years strong detachments of the regiment were employed in active service, apparently in expeditions against different hill-tribes. Of the work done I have been unable to discover any record, such expeditions being too common in the early days of British rule in India to excite much interest. In December 1815 the regiment took part in an expedition into the mountains of Cutch, whither no British troops had hitherto penetrated. On the march they crossed the Ran of Cutch, which separates Guzerat from the Cutch peninsula, and being in the advanced guard were the first English soldiers to cross it. The Ran being, from all accounts, merely a bed of sand which comparatively lately had been the bottom of a sea, the accounts of the march and the description of the country filled the Indian newspapers of the period. The news of Waterloo and of the close of the great war was exhausted, so a graphic picture of the Ran was welcome. [Sidenote: 1816.] The capture of a couple of hill forts, Aujar and Bhooj, soon quieted Cutch; and the troops then repassed the Ran to put down some local banditti and disperse some piratical tribes on the coast. The central nest of these tribes having been taken, the work was done; and accordingly after the capture of Dwarka, on the coast to the south of the Gulf of Cutch, the field force was broken up, and the Seventeenth returned to Ruttapore. The losses of the regiment in the work of those three years are unrecorded, and, except from disease, were probably not worth mention. Before quitting this year we must turn our eyes homeward for a moment, where rather an interesting matter was going forward. H.R.H. the Commander-in-Chief, at the opening of 1816, had become bitten with the notion of forming corps of Lancers in imitation of the Polish Lancers which had done such good service to the army under Napoleon. The first idea was to attach a troop of lancers to each cavalry regiment, just as a small body of riflemen was attached to a regiment of infantry. Lord Rosslyn offered the 9th Light Dragoons for the experiment, and trained fifty picked men under the command of Captain Peters. On Saturday, 20th April, these fifty men were reviewed in the Queen’s Riding-house at Pimlico, before a few select spectators who were admitted by ticket. The men were dressed in blue jackets faced with crimson, gray trousers and blue cloth caps, and carried a lance sixteen feet long with a pennon of the Union colours. “The opposite extremity of the lance,” continues our authority, “was confined in a leather socket attached to the stirrup, and the lance was supported near the centre by a loose string.” Such is an abridged account of the first parade of Lancers in England, taken from an extract from the _Sun_ newspaper of 22nd August 1816, and copied into the _Calcutta Gazette_, whence probably it found its way to the officers’ mess of the Seventeenth. [Illustration: