not drawn his sword without cause, nor put it up without honour." Charles Napier returned from his last fight at Kohat to find the reprimand of the Indian Government awaiting him. He at once resigned. He was quite prepared to stifle his personal feelings in the matter, but the sense of his powerlessness to remedy the evil he so plainly saw decided him. He would no longer remain accountable to the country for disaster he was helpless to prevent, exposed to a hundred secret shafts of his antagonists, and certain to find his old enemies, the Directors of Leadenhall Street, bitterly hostile to him, except when danger menaced their ill-gotten possession. He remembered also that fifty-two years earlier he had seen "that great and good soldier, Sir Ralph Abercrombie, resign command in Ireland because he could not agree with the civil government." Yes, he would resign. The Hampshire home looked pleasant from afar. What memories, what perfumes these garden-walks have for the tired toiler in life! What violet so sweet, what rose so thornless as those we see, looking back to some garden that has been, looking forward to one that can never be! Although Napier resigned his command in April he did not leave India until the following spring, having to await the arrival of his successor. The intervening months were not idly spent. To the latest moment of his stay he laboured to improve the army he loved so well, to instil into the officer higher ideals of duty and nobler purpose of life, and to improve the condition of the man in the ranks, who to him was now, as always, never "a common soldier." Feeling certain that the dreadful mortality then existing among the European troops in India resulted solely from the wretched barrack accommodation which the parsimony of the Government would only allow, he laboured incessantly to shame the Administration into more liberal and humane concession. Yet in this noble effort he was constantly thwarted. The height of his barrack-rooms was reduced, the materials for construction lessened. In vain he showed that sufficient cubic space meant thousands of lives annually saved, that height of the sleeping-rooms above the ground meant freedom from fevers and dysenteries. The various Boards of Control and clerks in Calcutta were not to be moved by such considerations. Terrible examples were before these various Boards and Directorates, but still they were not to be convinced. After the battles of the Sutlej the remains of a splendid regiment, the Fiftieth, were sent to occupy one of these ill-built death-traps at Loodiana. In one fell night the entire building collapsed, and three hundred men, women, and children perished in the ruins. Of course it was nobody's fault. The regulations had been strictly adhered to--and does not everybody know that regulation is infallible? Did they not once let a king of Spain burn to death in his palace because the regulation extinguisher of royal fires was not present at the conflagration?