An example of the tortuosity of the course of the Bagheriti, and of the way in which both it and the great Ganges abandon their beds and form new ones, leaving miles of their former channels unoccupied, or formed into stagnant lakes, was afforded at Augurdeep, a few miles from Plassey. After a long day’s journey (some fifteen or sixteen miles), we observed, to our great surprise, that we had halted within a few hundred yards of the spot from whence we had set out in the morning, the masts of boats moored there being visible across a narrow neck of land, or isthmus, connecting with the main land the peninsula we had been all day circumnavigating. This isthmus, in after years, was cut through, the river beating in full force against it, leaving, of course, a great extent of channel dry. If Clive’s victory, therefore, had left no more lasting memorial than the field on which it was gained, we should know but little about it. We were disappointed at our ill success, at least Miss Belfield and I; for the captain had anticipated that matters would be as we found them. I, however, consoled myself with a determination I had formed, to raise a monument of the victory a little more durable than the one which had just disappeared. I made up my mind to compose a poem, an epic, on the conquest of Bengal; Clive, of course, the hero, and Plassey the scene; on which, like the combatants, I proposed to put forth all my strength. I had for some days felt the stirring of the divine _afflatus_ within me, a sort of boiling and rioting of vast ideas; too vast, alas! I afterwards found, for utterance or delivery, for I stuck fast at “Immortal Clive.” Two or three days more brought us to the station of Burhampore. The day before we arrived, Captain Belfield received a letter from an old acquaintance at the station, one Colonel Heliogabalus Bluff, begging him to breakfast and dine with him on the morrow, and pass a day or two _en route_. The letter thus concluded: “I hear you have your sister with you; shall, of course, be glad to see the Beebee Sahib too; send herewith a _dolee_, which pray present to her, with my _bhote bhote salaam_. “A _dolly_, sir,” said I, in astonishment, on Captain Belfield’s reading this passage; “that’s rather an odd thing to send: he supposes, I presume, that Miss Belfield is a child.” Captain Belfield was attacked with a most violent fit of laughter on my making this remark, and I saw that I had been once more unwittingly griffinizing. When he had a little recovered his composure, “Gernon,” said he, “it will, add, perhaps, to your astonishment when I tell you, that we intend to eat the said _dolly_ for dinner, and shall expect you to partake of it.” Saying this, he ordered the article to be brought in, when, instead of a toy, I found the dolee was a basket of fruit, flowers, and vegetables.