[Illustration: Griffin Marching to Join.] MEMOIRS OF A GRIFFIN OR, A CADET’S FIRST YEAR IN INDIA. BY CAPTAIN BELLEW. _ILLUSTRATED FROM DESIGNS BY THE AUTHOR._ A New Edition. LONDON W. H. ALLEN & CO., LTD., 13 WATERLOO PLACE. S.W. PUBLISHERS TO THE INDIA OFFICE. 1891. TO MAJOR-GEN. SIR ROBERT CUNLIFFE, BART., C.B., OF ACTON PARK, DENBIGHSHIRE, LATE COMMISSARY-GENERAL OF THE BENGAL ARMY, IN WHOSE DEPARTMENT THE AUTHOR HAD FOR SOME YEARS THE HONOUR TO SERVE, THIS LITTLE WORK IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED, AS A MARK OF HIS SINCERE ESTEEM. PREFACE. Good wine, says the proverb, needs no bush; on the same principle, some will think that a book, if readable, may dispense with a preface. As a general rule this may be true, but there are occasions, and I take leave to deem this one of them, when, from the peculiar nature of the subject, a few preliminary observations, by creating a clear and possibly a pleasant understanding between the author and the gentle reader, may not be unacceptable or out of place. In the following little narrative, in which I have blended fact and fiction—though always endeavouring to keep the _vraisemblable_ in view—my object has been to depict some of those scenes, characters, and adventures, which some five-and-twenty or thirty years ago a “jolly cadet”—alias a Griffin—was likely to encounter, during the first year of his military career; men, manners, and things in general have, since that period, undergone considerable changes; still, in its main features, the sketch I have drawn, admitting its original correctness, will doubtless apply as well to Griffins in the present mature age of the century, as when it was in its teens. The Griffin, or Greenhorn, indeed, though subject, like everything else, to the external changes incident to time and fashion, is, perhaps, fundamentally and essentially, one of the “never ending, still beginning” states, or phases of humanity, destined to exist till the “crash of doom.”