How mournful he really felt his position to be, and how far the stern discipline of misery had already softened his intractable disposition, may be seen from one of his letters home, in which he says: “I have not enjoyed one happy day since I left my native country. If I should be so far blest as to revisit it again, but more especially Manchester” (this, by the way, was his mother’s native place) “the centre of all my wishes, all that I could hope or desire for would be presented before me in one view.” How little did the despairing lad dream as he wrote thus in some interval of his weary drudgery that when he did revisit his native land it would be as a conqueror, laurel-crowned, and hailed as one worthy to rank with the first soldiers of his age! But, bright as his fortune was to be, he appears just now to have been doing very little to deserve it. Macaulay tells us, in that brilliant essay of his, that he behaved just as badly to his official superiors as he had done to his schoolmasters, and came several times very near to being dismissed, and at length, so heavily did sickness of body and weariness of soul lie upon him, that twice in quick succession he attempted to blow his brains out, and twice the pistol missed fire. If those had been the days of central-fire, self-cocking revolvers, instead of flint-lock pistols, the history of Asia would have been changed, and what is now our Indian Empire would probably have been a French possession. It will be necessary just here to quote a little history with a view to seeing how matters stood in India at the time when Clive, as it is said, flung away the second useless pistol, and, like Wallenstein, exclaimed that after all he must have been born for something great. The map of India then was very different to what it is now. There was no red about it at all. In the East, France was practically mistress of the seas, whatever she might be elsewhere. The British flag only flew over one spot, and that only by sufferance. This was the little trading settlement of Madras, which was rented from the Nabob of the Carnatic, who was only the deputy of the deputy of the once mighty prince whom Europe knew vaguely as the Great Mogul. Fort St. George and Fort St. David were mere parodies of military stations, and the nucleus of the army which was to conquer the whole Peninsula consisted chiefly of half-trained natives, miscellaneously armed with bows and arrows, swords and bucklers, and here and there a firelock. On the other hand, France possessed the Island of Mauritius and the town and district of Pondicherry, the former governed by Labourdonnais and the latter by Dupleix, both men of great capacity and still greater ambition.