Some time in 1792 the partiality of the Begam for M. Levaissoult began to show itself; and Mr. Thomas who was not only conscious of his own merits, but had all the hatred of a Frenchman which characterized the British tar of those days, resolved to quit her service and attempt a more independent career. With this view he retired, in the first instance, to Anupshahar on the Ganges, so often noticed in these pages, and now, for some time, the cantonment of the frontier brigade of the English establishment in the Presidency of the Fort William. Here he found a hospitable welcome, and from this temporary asylum commenced a correspondence with Appa Khandi Rao, a chief whom he had formerly met in the Mahratta army, and whose service he presently entered with an assignment of land in Ismail Beg's former Jaigir of Mewat. In the Mewat country he remained for the next eighteen months, engaged in a long and arduous attempt to subjugate his nominal subjects; in which employment we must for the present leave him engaged. In the meanwhile the Begam had been married to M. Levaissoult, according to the rites of the ancient Church to which both adhered. Unfortunately for the lady's present reputation and the gentleman's official influence, the marriage was private; the only witnesses of the ceremony being two of the bridegroom's friends, MM. Saleur and Bernier. All this time Sindhia was at Punah endeavouring to raise his influence in the Mahratta country to something like a level with his power in Hindustan. But the situation was one of much greater difficulty in the former instance than in the latter. In the one case he had to deal with a blind old voluptuary, of whom he was sole and supreme master; in the other the sovereign Madhu Rao Peshwa was in the vigour of life, and had a confidential adviser in the Nana Farnavis, who was almost a match for the Patel in ability, and had an undoubted superiority in the much greater unity of his objects and the comparative narrowness of his field of action. It is no part of my task to trace the labyrinth of Mahratta politics in a work which merely professes to sketch the anarchy of Hindustan; it will be sufficient for our present purpose to state that the Tarikh-i-Muzafari, the Persian history to which we have heretofore been so largely indebted, notices an incident as occurring at this time which is not detailed in the usually complete record of Captain Grant Duff, though it is not at variance with the account that he gives of Punah politics in 1794. The Persian author briefly states that the Peshwa (whose mind was certainly at this time much embittered against Madhoji Sindhia) sent assassins to waylay him at a little distance from the city, against whose attack the Patel defended himself with success, but only escaped at the expense of some severe wounds. From the situation of the writer, who appears always to have lived in Bihar or Hindustan, as well as from the vagueness with