not only as cultivators but as artificers, had rendered them in the estimation of their powerful masters a valuable kind of property, to be protected from foreign tyranny that they might better bear their burdens at home. These taxes were enforced with a rigour intended to offend the Douranee chiefs; but the trials to which they were then subjected but faintly foreshadowed the greater trials to come. Little by little, the Barukzye Sirdars began to attach such vexatious conditions to the privileges of the Douranees—so to make them run the gauntlet of all kinds of exactions short of the direct assessment of their lands—that in time, harassed, oppressed, impoverished by these more irregular imposts, and anticipating every day the development of some new form of tyranny and extortion, they were glad to exchange them for an assessment of a more fixed and definite character. From a minute detail of the measures adopted by the Barukzye Sirdars, with the double object of raising revenue and breaking down the remaining strength of the Douranees, the reader would turn away with weariness and impatience; but this matter of Douranee taxation has too much to do with the after-history of the war in Afghanistan, for me to pass it by without at least this slight recognition of its importance. In the heyday of their prosperity, the Douranees had been too arrogant and unscrupulous to claim from us commiseration in the hour of their decline. The Barukzye Sirdars held them down with a strong hand; and the policy was at least successful. It was mainly the humiliation of these once dominant tribes that secured to Dost Mahomed and his brothers so many years of comparative security and rest. Slight disorders, such as are inseparable from the constitution of Afghan society—a rebellion in one part of the country, the necessity of coercing a recusant governor in another—occasionally distracted the mind of the Sirdar from the civil administration of Caubul. But it was not until the year 1834 that he was called upon to face a more pressing danger, and to prepare himself for a more vigorous contest. The exiled Suddozye Prince, Shah Soojah, weary again of inactivity, and undaunted by past failure, was about to make another effort to re-establish himself in the Douranee Empire; and, with this object, was organising an army in Sindh.