The major first showed our men to their new quarters; and I told them off to their different barrack-rooms, and saw them settled down. Then he and his subaltern led us to the Mess where we met a third officer, the doctor, a young lieutenant in the Indian Medical Service named Smith, who was to remain on in Buxa in medical charge of my detachment. Then ensued the wearisome task of taking over charge of all the Government property in the Station, from the rifle-range and the ammunition in the magazine to picks and shovels, buckets and waterproof coats. We had next to do our own bargaining over the buying of the store of tinned provisions, jams, pickles and wines in the Mess, as well as the scanty furniture in it. Among other things we purchased were two Bhutanese mountain sheep--huge creatures with horns. Meat being a rare commodity in Buxa, the major had bought them from a Bhuttia from across the border. Not needing to kill them at once, he had let them roam freely about the Mess garden until, as he said, they had become such pets that he could not harden his heart sufficiently to order them to be killed for food. My subaltern and I mentally resolved not to allow them to become thus endeared to us by long association. Dinner in the Mess that night was quite a pleasant function, everyone but the doctor being in the best of spirits. As he was not to take his departure on the morrow, he was not as cheerful as the two Punjabi officers, who were delighted to think that they were so soon to leave Buxa. They had, perhaps, reason to rejoice at their return to civilisation and the society of their kind. They had come there from Tibet, where they had been quartered in the wilds from the end of the fighting in the war of 1904 to the evacuation of the country by our troops. They frankly pitied us for the prospect of two years' exile in this isolated post, where a strange white face was rarely seen. They fully expatiated on the loneliness of it. In a Bhuttia village a few miles over the hills there was an elderly American lady missionary. Down in the forest below a few English tea-planters were scattered about, the nearest fifteen or twenty miles from us. During the winter we might expect an occasional visitor, a General or our Colonel on inspection duty, or a Public Works Department Official come to see to the state of the road or the repair of the buildings. During the rainy season, which lasts seven months, from April to the end of October, with a rainfall therein from two hundred to three hundred inches, we would see no stranger and probably be cut off from outside intercourse by the washing away of the roads. As during those months the forest below would be filled with the deadly Terai fever, we could not solace our loneliness by sport which rendered the remainder of the year bearable. And as the jungle around us, which grew to our very doors would, during the Rains, swarm with leeches which fasten in scores on man or beast if given the