“It is not my fault that there has been such a tremendous gap in our correspondence. I have written to you again and again, and I once more seize the opportunity of the mail-dâk passing through to send you a few lines, and hope they will meet with a better fate than my other effusions, not one of which appears to have reached you, judging by your incendiary letter. Doubtless they are in the hands of those beggars the Afridis, who rob the mails and cut the telegraph-wires continually. We are all flourishing--men in good spirits, horses in capital condition; the only thing we ask is to be up and doing. Cold weather has closed the passes to a great extent, and there is nothing whatever going on. To come into our camp you would never dream that you were in an enemy’s country, we have made ourselves so completely at home, although our accommodation is not magnificent. We have all small hill-tents, weighing about eighty pounds, in which there is just room enough to turn round, and no more. We all wear thick fur coats, called poshteens, and fur caps, quite the Canadian style. You would have some difficulty in recognising me, I can tell you, were you told to pick me out from among a dozen of fellows sitting round our favourite rendezvous--the camp-fire. There is snow on the ranges all round, and we have lots of ice without troubling the ice-machines, but hot grog is more the fashion than iced champagne. “We arrived here six weeks ago, _viâ_ the Khan Pass, and brought in, among other prisoners, Hadji Khan, a notorious robber and unmitigated rascal. We have him in camp now. He has the most diabolical expression I ever beheld; nevertheless, the length and frequency of his prayers are absolutely astounding. He spends more than half the day on his marrow-bones, no doubt consigning us, in all generations, to Gehenna, if you know where that is? “The Afghans, take them all in all, are a fine-looking set of men, with bigger frames and fairer skins than the natives of sunny Hindostan. Their physiognomy is decidedly of the Jewish caste--piercing black eyes and hooked noses, set off by a resolute, not to say savage, expression of death and extermination to all the Feringhees! “Now, this cold weather, they are wrapped in poshteens, with or without sleeves, of very dubious cleanliness. A good serviceable garment descends from generation to generation. An enormous dark-blue puggaree encircling a little red cap forms their turban. But the headman of a village, in a richly-embroidered poshteen, ‘the woolly side in,’ like the immortal Brian O’Lynn--magnificent gold and blue turban, and long silver-mounted matchlock, is as handsome and picturesque a looking fellow as you could wish to see.