seen you safely through the great defile of the Bolan, and yet I am unrewarded.” Burnes had brought with him the draft of a treaty, which, on the following day, he sent to the Khan. He had made it a condition of all peaceable negotiation with the Beloochee Prince, that he should wait upon Shah Soojah in his camp—a condition which Mehrab Khan disliked and resisted, and from which he could extricate himself only by pleading sickness. The treaty, by which the supremacy of Shah Soojah was distinctly acknowledged, bound the British Government to pay Mehrab Khan a lakh and a half of rupees annually, in return for which the Khan engaged to “use his best endeavours to procure supplies, carriage, and guards to protect provisions and stores going and coming from Shikarpoor, by the route of Rozan, Dadur, the Pass of Bolan, through Shawl to Koochlak, from one frontier to another.” Mehrab Khan affixed his seal to the treaty. But he disliked the bargain he had made. He was altogether suspicions of Shah Soojah and the Suddozyes. He was by no means certain of the success of the present enterprise. He believed that, by paying homage to the Shah, he would raise up a host of powerful enemies, and plunge himself into a sea of ruin. Striving to allay the apprehensions of the Khan, Burnes made some trifling concessions, which were not without their effect; and then proceeded to press upon him the subject which at that moment was of most immediate importance to British interests—the matter of supplies; and earnestly pointed out the imperative necessity of every possible exertion being made by the Khan to provide them. But it was easier to suggest such provision than to make it. Mehrab Khan said that he would do his best—that he would place men at Burnes’s disposal to proceed to Nooshky and other places, where the crops were nearly ripe (”and,” said Burnes, parenthetically, “he has done so”)—that he would “give grain in Gundava and Cutchee, and if we would send for our stores at Shikarpoor to Dadur, he would actively aid in passing them through the Bolan—that he might also aid us at Moostung in getting a small quantity of grain; but that there was really very little grain at Khelat, or in the country—that he had reduced his escort to wait on the Shah to 1000 men, on account of the scarcity—and that he could not then furnish the grain, but each man must bring his own.” “This intelligence,” wrote Burnes to Macnaghten, “is very distressing in our present position; but my inquiries serve to convince me that there is but a small supply of grain in this country, and none certainly to be given us, without aggravating the present distress of the inhabitants—some of whom are feeding on herbs and grasses gathered in the jungle. It is with some difficulty we have supported ourselves, whilst the small quantities we have procured have been got by stealth. This scarcity is corroborated by a blight in last year’s harvest. Under such circumstances, the only