patience, and possessed the happy knack of disposing of the largest quantity of meat in the smallest given quantity of time of any man I ever met with, in order to be ready for a renewed round at the mutton. Of passengers we had the usual number and variety: civilians, returning with wholesale stocks of English and continental experiences and recollections of the aristocratic association, &c., for Mofussil consumption; old officers, going back to ensure their “off-reckonings” preparatory to their final “off-reckoning;” junior partners in mercantile houses; sixteenth cousins from Forres and Invernesshire obeying the spell of kindred attraction (would that we had a little more of its influence south of the Tweed!); officers to supply the wear and tear of cholera and dysentery in his (then) Majesty’s regiments; matrons returning to expectant husbands, and bright-eyed spinsters to get—a peep at the country—nothing more;—then we had an assistant surgeon or two, more _au fait_ at whist than Galenicals, and the two raw, unfledged griffins—to wit, Grundy and myself—completed the list. But of the afore-mentioned variety, I shall only select half a dozen for particular description, and as characteristic of the mass. First, there was Colonel Kilbaugh, a colonel of cavalry and ex-resident of Paugulabad, who, in spite of his high-heeled Hobys, was a diminutive figure, pompous, as little men generally are, and so anxious, apparently, to convince the world that he had a soul above his inches, that egad, sir, it was dangerous for a man above the common standard of humanity to look at him, or differ in opinion in the slightest degree. His was in truth A fiery soul, which, working out its way, Fretted the pigmy body to decay. He excelled (in his own estimation) in long stories, which he told with an extraordinary minuteness of detail. They generally began with, “Shortly after I was appointed to the residency of Paugulabad,” or, “The year before, or two years after, I left the residency of Paugulabad:” in short, that was his chronological starting-point. The colonel’s _yarns_ principally (though not entirely) related to wonderful sporting exploits, and the greater the bounce the more scrupulously exact was he in the _minutiæ_, magnanimously disregarding the terrors of cross-examination, should a seven-foot mortal venture one. “It was the largest tiger that, sir, I ever killed; he stood 4 feet 4¾ inches to the top of his shoulder—4 feet 4¾ was it, by-the-bye?—no, I’m wrong; 4 feet 4½. I killed him with a double Joe I got from our doctor; I think it was the cold season before I left the residency of Paugulabad.” It was one of the most amusing things in the world to see him marching up and down the poop with our Colossus of a skipper—“Ossa to a wart”—one little fin of a hand behind his back, and laying down the law with the other; skipper, with an eye to future recommendation, very deferential of course.