Meanwhile Dost Mohammed Khan, another prince of the family, seized on the beautiful vale of the Cabul river; and the Lion of Lahore, Runjeet Sing (with whose name the newspapers long made us familiar) over-ran all Cashmere. Dost Mohammed was desirous of securing the friendship of the British Government, who sent Captain (afterwards Sir Alexander) Burnes to him; but the honourable reception he accorded to a Russian officer at Cabul about the first year of Her present Majesty's reign caused him to be secretly distrusted by the Governor-General of India. The latter, with a view to secure our north-western frontier against Russian influence, and an intended invasion of the peninsula, became a party to a treaty between Shah Sujah, third son of the deceased Mahmud of Herat and Afghanistan, to re-establish him on the throne of his ancestors; and hence war was declared against the Dost, whose ally, Runjeet Sing, refused permission for our troops to march through the Punjaub--"The land of the five rivers." But, heedless of this, two Corps d'Armée, advancing simultaneously from Bombay and Bengal, under Sir Willoughby Cotton, ten thousand strong, soon found themselves under the walls of Candahar; and next Ghuznee, the most formidable fortress in Asia, was stormed at the point of the bayonet, after its gates had been blown in by a petard, and there enormous booty was found. The seventh of the subsequent August saw the union-jack hoisted on the Bala Hissar of Cabul, and Shah Sujah, an aged, effete, and most unpopular prince, brought from exile in Loodianah and replaced upon his ancient and hereditary throne, while an army of eight thousand Beloochees and other wild warriors, sons of the Gedrosian desert, was assigned him, under the command of the Shahzadeh Timour and Colonel Simpson of the 19th Native Infantry; for such were the arrangements of that Honourable Company of Merchants whose office was in Leadenhall Street, in the City. The restored Shah, a cruel and ruthless prince, who blinded his kinsman Futteh Khan, by thrusting a dagger into his eyes, and afterwards having him hacked into "kabobs," soon excited great discontent among the fiery tribes under his rule, and particularly by retaining a regiment of Sikhs as his body-guard; and so resolute and manifest became the hostility of the natives, that the situation of the small British force--now reduced to little more than four thousand men--cantoned without the walls of Cabul, grew daily more perilous and critical, while General Elphinstone, who now commanded, by age and health was quite unequal to the task assigned him. After a long and arduous contest, Dost Mohammed became at last the peaceful prisoner of the British Government; for it chanced that one evening, after his last battle and defeat, our envoy, Sir William Macnaghten, when riding near Cabul, was overtaken by a horseman, whose steed, like himself, was covered with dust and blood and flakes of foam.