THE bara Sahib had proposed to move on his camp to a distant part of the district. Mr. Thole’s plans were laid, and he was not a man lightly to change them. The commissioner’s tents were struck, and put on the backs of camels; his servants had gone forward in advance with the cooking utensils—for the great man must have his dinner ready for him on his arrival at Dhaul. In order to have it ready, chickens would have to be captured, killed, and cooked, mutton procured, vegetables boiled, curry prepared, and of course tents pitched for the Sahib’s accommodation. But plans, however well laid, cannot always be carried out, and troubles and inconveniences come sometimes even to Commissioner Sahibs. First appears the dark sais to inform his master that his riding horse has cast a shoe, and that no one can quickly be found to replace it. The blacksmith has gone to a wedding. “If I can’t ride, I can drive,” said the Sahib with a frown. “Order the buggy [gig] to be got ready at once.” Accordingly, the buggy-horse is put into harness; but even as John Gilpin, when on the point of starting, saw “three customers come in” to detain him, so is the not very patient commissioner detained by three headmen from three villages, each with a separate petition to make. The commissioner mutters something not very complimentary to his visitors, but stands resolutely to listen with as good a grace as he can to fulsome compliments on his wisdom, justice, and generosity, and then to expressions of that kind of gratitude which has been well defined as “expectation of favours to come.” The commissioner is an able man, but there are two things which he has never quite succeeded in performing,—to make tedious petitioners study conciseness, and to keep his own temper under the infliction of their harangues. At length the three lambardars are dismissed. Mr. Thole gets into his buggy, and takes the rein into his hand. The pawing horse is on the point of starting on his journey, when another unforeseen annoyance occurs. A brown urchin has been pelting with bits of hard mud a large tree near, to bring down the sour fruit which he sees on its branches. On that same tree wild bees have been making a kind of nest, larger than the head of a man. One of the pellets hits the nest, and brings down the vengeance of its warlike inmates, not on the boy who has disturbed them, but on the unoffending sais and horse. The air is full of buzzing, and half-a-dozen bees presume to attack the Commissioner Sahib himself. Maddened by the pain caused by a hundred stings, the poor horse, with bees clustering over his nostrils and eyes, rushes forward at speed, dashes the buggy against the stump of a tree, breaks the harness, and smashes the wheel.