The coolie, a Nepaulese, carried my baggage up the mountains at a sharp trot, and reached the hotel but two hours after my own arrival. It was a wonderful exhibition of strength and endurance. The distance was thirty miles and the weight of the burden nearly eighty pounds. The hill-tribes, breathing a cool and invigorating air, are alone equal to such displays of vigor and endurance. Some time afterward, in going to Simla in the Western Himalayas, I employed coolies who were possessed of the same wonderful stamina as these Nepaulese. They were splendid-looking men, shorty but thick-set and very muscular, with olive-brown skins, piercing black eyes, long glossy hair and regular and handsome features. One of this class of men (Hindoo hill-tribes) will carry thirty _seers_ (sixty pounds) upon his back, or twenty-five seers upon his head, up the hills for fifty miles, without rest or food, in twenty-four hours; his charge for which is but one rupee--a special instance of the astonishingly cheap labor of all India. The road ran the whole distance on the face of almost perpendicular hills, and for the greater part of the way was guarded by a low wall on the dangerous side. The scenery was most grand, and I already felt well repaid for the arduous journey from Calcutta. Some views were, however, rather frightful. Imagine a ride on the very brink of a precipice thirty-five hundred feet in depth, with the hills rising abruptly on the other hand twenty-five hundred feet in height above you. The tops of the distant and lofty mountains were all hidden in the clouds, but the scenery of the valleys beneath one's feet was very beautiful. The immense fields of tea planted in rectangular rows, the dark-green and dense foliage of the forests, with here a planter's dwelling or a factory glistening in the morning's sun, and there perhaps a little silvery waterfall or a bubbling brook, and great black shadows cast by the clouds, made a truly impressive picture. And yet, though already on hills more than a mile in height, I had only gained this altitude in order to obtain glimpses of much higher and grander mountains, nearly a hundred miles distant.