In one direction only—the annual pilgrimage to the Hedjaz—may the plague be said to have brought any relief to the overworked police-force. The arrangements made by Messrs. Thomas Cook and Sons for shipping the pilgrims were discontinued about 1892, and in 1893 the Police Commissioner, acting through his pilgrim department and with the aid of the divisional and harbour police, shepherded the large number of 13,500 pilgrims to the embarkation sheds. Approximately the same number sailed in 1895. Directly the plague, however, had firmly established its hold upon Bombay, the annual exodus of pilgrims was prohibited, in response partly to international requirements, and during the remainder of Mr. Vincent’s term of office the Haj traffic practically ceased. A few pilgrims from Central Asia (1300 in 1898) and other distant regions found their way yearly to Bombay, in the hope of proceeding to Mecca: but they were sent back every year to their homes, until the restrictions were removed and the traffic was re-opened. Upon the health of the police force the plague naturally exercised a disastrous effect. A fairly high percentage of sickness was recorded in 1895 and was ascribed chiefly to overcrowding in squalid tenements. The appearance of plague in the last quarter of 1896 raised the death-roll of that year to 50 and increased the number of admissions to hospital by nearly 300. The experience of 1897 was worse. Eighty-two men died, of whom fifty-two were plague-victims: recruiting for the force entirely ceased. More than 3,000 admissions to hospital were recorded, some of the constables being obliged to undergo treatment there three or four times during the year. To make up in some degree for the deficit, the Commissioner was obliged to take men from the Ramoshi force, which supplies night-guards to shops and offices and is paid by the employers. Many of these semi-official watchmen also succumbed. Several years elapsed before the police-force recovered from the effects of the early years of the plague, when the loss of physical power of resistance to the disease, engendered by continuous overwork, was aggravated by the lack of commodious and sanitary lines and barracks. Those who, like the author, can recall the panic which prevailed in those years, and who day by day and night after night saw the sky above the Queen’s road crimson with the glow of the funeral-pyres in the Hindu burning-ground, will not grudge a tribute of praise to the Indian constables who went about their work unflinchingly, while men were dying around them in hundreds and their own caste-fellows in the factories and the docks were flying from the scourge to their homes in the Deccan and the Konkan.