not the picture which India saw, which Outram saw, and which calm and impartial history must see to-day. And here let us look for a moment on the field of war, for war it was to be, that lay before this army camped under the winter starlight on this last night of 1842. A vast dreary world was this Scinde. Men who knew it best called it the Unhappy Valley, and the name fitted accurately the nation. A flat, dusty, sun-scorched, fever-poisoned land; an Egypt turned the wrong way, and with a past so blurred and battered that no eye could read it; a changeless landscape of dusty distance through which the meanest habitations of men loomed at intervals, with ragged solitary acacia trees, and old broken mosques and mounds that had once been cities, and towns that were always shrinking, and graveyards that were ever growing. In the centre of this Unhappy Valley rolled the Indus--a broad rapid river when the summer flood poured down its silt-sided channel, a lean shrunken stream when winter heaped high his snowflakes in the mountains of Afghanistan; and yet a rich land wherever water could be given to its thirsty surface. Man had only to scuffle and hoe the baked dust, pour water over it, and in a month or two the arid plain became a waving sea of emerald green, to quickly change again to a vast level of yellowing grain. But it is a strange fact that wherever these conditions of dusty desert turned green with animal inundation are found, there too you will find man a slave and a tyrant. Grades there may be between, but always the lowest layers of the human strata will be slaves, and the upper ones will be their owners. And nowhere was this rule more certain than in Scinde. The native Scindian who grubbed the earth, dug the canal, and turned the water-wheel, was a slave. The Beloochee, whether he called himself predatory hill-man, settled lord of the valley, or ruling Ameer, was a tyrant. What the Mameluke had been to Egypt the Beloochee was to Scinde--a ruling caste, fierce fighters, making free with every rule of their prophet, faithful only to his fanatic spirit. Three separate groups of rulers called Ameers governed Scinde. They all claimed equal descent from the Talpoor chief who, seventy years before this period, had come down from Beloochistan and conquered the Unhappy Valley. There were the Ameers of Lower Scinde, who dwelt in Hyderabad; those of Upper Scinde, whose headquarters was Khyrpoor; and those of East Scinde, who ruled at Meerpoor. As their descent was equal, so their characters were alike. Prosperity and power and self-indulgence had taken the old Beloochee steel out of their natures. They drank, they feasted, they hunted, and they loved after the fashion of the East. That they were not so weak or so vicious as a thousand rulers of India lying farther south is clear, but it was only because they were nearer to the mountains from whose flinty rocks they had come three generations earlier. Everything