It was strange finding myself back in Manipur after nearly nine months’ absence; but though the house had had several improvements made to it, and the grounds were prettier than when we had left in February, I could not settle down in the place as I had done before. Poor Mr. Heath was buried in our own garden, quite close to the house—so close, in fact, that I could see his grave from my bedroom window. There had been two graves there before—one was Major Trotter’s, who was once political agent at Manipur, and died there from wounds which he had received fighting in Burmah; the other was that of a young Lieutenant Beavor, who had also died at the Residency, of fever. But we had never known either of these two men, so that I did not look upon them in the same light as I did on Mr. Heath, and his sudden, sad death seemed to haunt me. Once a friend of mine remarked to my husband, ‘What an unlucky place Manipur is! I have seen so many political agents go up there, and something always seems to happen to them.’ Hearing this gave me a cold shudder, and I longed to get my husband to give up a place so associated with gloomy incidents, and take some other district in the province. Not that I was ever really afraid of anything tangible. [Illustration: THE GARDENS OF THE RESIDENCY AT MANIPUR.] I rode alone all over the country, fearing nothing from the inhabitants, who knew me, and would have been only too ready to help me had I needed aid; and I have been left for days together quite alone at the Residency while my husband had to be out in camp. Once he had to go down to Tammu in Burmah, five days’ journey from Manipur, and I was too ill to go with him, so stayed behind. For sixteen days I was there all alone. We had no neighbours nearer than a hundred miles off, and I never even heard English spoken until my husband returned. The old ayah used to sleep on my doormat at night, and I always had sentries outside the house, back and front. I used to hear, or imagine I heard, all kinds of noises sometimes, and get up, waking the old woman from her noisy slumbers to come and do a midnight parade all round the house, searching in every nook and corner for the disturber of my rest, which was probably nothing more harmful than an antiquated bat roaming about in the roof, or a rat in the cellars beneath the house. The poor old ayah used to pretend to be very valiant on these occasions and carefully hunt in every dark corner which I had already turned out; but she was always glad to get back when the search was ended to her own venerable blanket, in which she used to roll her attenuated form, and snore away the long vigils of the nights.