By the time that Audley Trevelyan had reached this occasional seat of government--the Balmoral of India--Lord Auckland, whose vacillation and mismanagement of the Cabul campaign gave great umbrage, had returned to Britain, and another Governor-General had arrived--one who boldly stigmatised the Afghan project of his predecessor (now created an earl) "as a folly, and that it yet remained to be seen whether it might not prove a crime;" and so Audley presented, of necessity, the reports and Jellalabad despatches of Sir Robert Sale to this new Viceroy, whose firmness of character and past promise as a statesman gave a guerdon that we should yet retrieve all that we had lost of prestige beyond the Indus; to which end he took the executive power from the weak hands of those secretaries to whom it had been previously committed, and resolved to wield it himself, though he found in India a treasury well-nigh empty, an army exasperated, and the hearts of men depressed by fears for the future. But tidings of the storming of Ghuznee by General Nott, of the advance upon Cabul, the recapture of it after our victory at Tizeen, and the rescue of the hostages, followed so quickly upon each other to Simla, that soon after the arrival of Audley, he was informed that as there would be no necessity for his return to Jellalabad, he was to remain provisionally attached to the staff, either till he could rejoin his regiment, or our troops re-entered the Punjaub--a little slice of India, having a population equal to all that of England. So by this arrangement he found himself a mere idler, a dangler attached to the Viceregal court, where now the glorious war that Napier was to inaugurate against the treacherous Ameers of Scinde was schemed out, and where a series of reviews, dinners, balls, and a durbar, or assembly of the native princes, was proposed to welcome Pollock's troops when they came down country, and were once again, as the Viceroy expressed it, in "our native territories;" and the programme of all those gayeties was to be fully arranged when his lady and other ladies of the mimic court arrived, after the rainy season, which continues there from June till the middle of September, was nearly over. On the first day of October, when her ladyship and the suite were to arrive, the durbar of native princes was to be held, and the final proclamation of the Governor-General concerning the affairs of Afghanistan was to be read aloud and issued. As this was but an instance of Anglo-Indian pageantry, though Audley Trevelyan rode amid the brilliant staff of his Excellency, and it all led to something of more interest, we shall only notice it briefly.