Our morning's work finished, we climbed up the hill for breakfast in the Mess. This was a long, single-storied stone building with an iron roof, erected on pillars which raised it six feet from the ground. From the tangled wilderness of the garden, bright with the vivid colours of huge bushes of poinsettia and bougainvillias, a flight of steps led up to the railed veranda which ran along the front of the building, and on to which opened the four rooms--the end ones used as quarters by Creagh and Smith, the centre apartments being the ante-room and dining-room. I wonder what some writers of military fiction, who prate glibly of the luxury in which army officers live, would say to the bare rooms and whitewashed walls of our Mess, furnished only with a few rickety tables and unsteady chairs. Or my subaltern's abode. One room, an iron cot borrowed from the hospital, a kitchen table, one dilapidated chair, a tin bath, and an iron basin on an old packing-case, comprised the sum-total of his possessions. Other furniture we could not get in Buxa; for the nearest shops were three hundred miles away in Calcutta. Of course, crockery, cooking-pots, glassware, linen and cutlery, we had to provide for ourselves. These we had brought with us. Before long, by dint of colour-washing the stone walls, hanging curtains and draperies of native cloth, and decorating the bare walls with the heads of animals we shot, we succeeded in making the Mess quite habitable and cosy. We were not much better off in the bare necessities of life. Buxa produced little in the way of food. Chickens--more literally, hens of no uncertain antiquity--and eggs of almost equal age were often procurable locally. But no meat. Sometimes a Bhuttia from across the frontier brought a goat for sale; and, although the Asiatic goat is an abomination, yet such an occasion was a red-letter day for us. Bread was sent us by rail from a railway refreshment-room twenty-four hours away, and did not always arrive. Fresh vegetables we never saw until later on we tried our prentice hands at gardening--and a sorry mess we made of it. In the winter we could add to the pot by the help of our rifles and guns; and venison and jungle fowl were a welcome change from the monotony of our menus. But our staple food consisted of tinned provisions--an expensive and wearisome diet. I dare say the British workman would have turned up his nose at our usual fare; and I could not blame him. Even the water supply in Buxa was a difficult question. Our Mess got its water from a spring in the hills hundreds of yards away, led down in bamboos to the kitchen. The fort was supplied from another spring in the base of the hill on which it was built; and all day long the _bhistis_[2] toiled up and down bringing the water in goatskin bags. But a few months after our arrival the springs nearly gave out; and I was faced with the necessity of abandoning fort and station, and moving