The appointment of this Board appears to have interfered with the control which the commandant of artillery had previously exercised over his department, and Colonel Pearse attributed its formation to a personal motive, on the part of General Clavering, to lower him. In writing to an old friend, after other complaints he goes on to say: “General Clavering instituted a Board of Ordnance, and made me a member of it; took all my authority away, and made me a cipher. I was hurt, and complained, as he had put into the Board a Lieutenant-Colonel Dow, the translator of a miserable history of Hindustan, and the author of two wretched plays. This man is commissary-general, and, as such, controller of military accounts. He uniformly attacked me and my department, and I defended myself and officers. This created disputes, and, as I was wounded, I was warm; and thus, because my opinions were always contrary to Dow’s (and D—— is the general’s tongue, brains, head, and heart), it was as bad as attacking the general himself.” Of the working of the cumbrous machinery of the Board of Ordnance, in its original formation and in the successive changes which have been made from time to time, in the vain attempts to obtain energy and celerity from a body of men without individual power or responsibility, it will often, in the course of these pages, be necessary to speak, for to the want of arrangement on their part must be attributed, in many instances, the inefficient state of the siege-trains with the armies. At this time the head-quarters of the regiment were quartered in Fort William, moving out during the cold months to a practice-ground at Sulkeah, nearly opposite the western mouth of the Circular Canal: the powder-works were between the canal and Cossipoor. The dress of the regiment consisted of a blue coat, faced with scarlet, and cut away in the fashion of the time; white cloth waistcoat and breeches, with buckles at the knees; and gaiters, or half-spatterdashes, as they were called; red leathern belt, with swivels; black silk stock; buff gloves, and regimental hat, supposed to be a plain cocked, in the fashion of George the Second’s time. The hair was worn greased, powdered, and tied in a queue, false hair being substituted when the natural was not long enough.