The colonel now addressed me, and, in a very kind and encouraging manner, eulogized the way in which I had acquitted myself on my first appearance in public, adding, “I hope we shall send you to your regiment up the country quite a proficient, and calculated to reflect credit on your instructors in the Zubberdust Bullumteers.” As our worthy commandant was anxious that I should have an insight into the various branches of military duty, the adjutant was desired to make me attend regimental courts-martial, invaliding committees, guard mountings, &c., that I might see how these duties were carried on. The first court-martial I attended was a regimental one for the trial of a black drummer for theft. Tom took me to the bungalow of the superintending officer, who is always an European, and whose duty it is to conduct the proceedings which he records, assisted by the regimental interpreter, who is also the quarter-master of the regiment. Shortly after our arrival, the native officers composing the court made their appearance; they were all large, portly men, singular compounds of those moral antipodes, the European and the Asiatic. Instead of the black military stock of the English officer, they wore, over white cotton collars, necklaces of gold, formed of massive embossed beads, each almost as large as a small bean or nutmeg; the overalls of the majority had been pulled up over the _Dotee_, or waistcloth, a Hindoo article of dress, containing almost cloth enough to serve for the envelopment of a mummy. [Illustration: The Native Court-martial.] This swathing of the loins, gathered into a bunch behind and before, renders a considerable amplitude of waistband indispensably necessary, and causes, moreover, very often an unseemly protuberance under the jacket flaps on the hinder regions, ornamental, no doubt, in a dromedary or Hottentot Venus, though any thing but improving to the appearance of a military man. In spite, however, of these little drawbacks, or, perhaps, I should say humpbacks, there was much in the general appearance of these Indian veterans which to me, as a novice, and not altogether an unobservant one, was exceedingly striking and interesting, not having yet had an opportunity of observing them so leisurely; to those, however, accustomed to see them daily, these feelings doubtless had long since died away. Two or three were aged men, whose snowy whiskers and mustachios contrasted strikingly with the swarthy hue of their well-chiselled and manly countenances; gold and silver medals hung on their breasts, mementoes of past services under a Wellesley, a Coote, a Baird, a Harris, a Lake, or some other of the many commanders who have led the brave and faithful sepoy, where’er in this hemisphere Britain has had a cause to maintain, and whose deeds are chronicled in some of the brightest pages of Indian military history.