With this the ceremony was at an end. Runjeet Singh returned to Lahore, and the Viceroy followed him on his first visit to the Sikh principality. The final dispositions and selections were made by the Commander-in-chief. A few weeks previously Soojah's levies, about 6000 strong, horse, foot, and artillery, under the command of Major-General Simpson, had left Loodhianah on their way to the front, and on December 10th, 1838, the British troops marched out from Ferozepore on their first stage to the Afghan capital. A glance at the map will suffice to show that a more direct route might have been found from Ferozepore to Cabul than down the bank of the Indus to Bukkur, thence, across the river, by Shikarpoor and Dadur, through the Bolan Pass, to Quettah, and from Quettah, through the Kojuck, by Candahar and Ghuznee to Cabul. In short, as Kaye points out, the army was about to traverse two sides of a triangle, instead of shaping its course along a third. But there were two important reasons for the choice of the longer route. In the first place, Runjeet Singh had strong objections to opening the Punjab to our troops; and in the second place the Ameers of Sindh were to be "coerced." Shikarpoor, on the northern bank of the Indus, had originally formed a part of the great Douranee Empire, handed down by Timour to Zemaun Shah and his brothers, intact as it had been received from the founder, Ahmed. But piece by piece the kingdom had been dismembered through the quarrels and weaknesses of its rulers. Cashmere, and Mooltan, and Peshawur had been won by the Sikhs; Herat had risen to independence; while Shikarpoor with a fair slice of the southern frontier had passed to the Ameers of Sindh. But though Shikarpoor was theirs, they held, or had held it, in consideration only of a yearly tribute, which tribute, unpaid through many years, had now swelled, as Soojah maintained, to no less a sum than twenty lakhs of rupees, a sum gratuitously increased by the English Government to twenty-five lakhs, that the terms of Runjeet Singh (who was to have received half, but had lately increased his wants) might be granted without Soojah being the sufferer. The Ameers themselves, however, told a different tale. Independently of their not unreasonable objections to the validity of a claim that had been suffered to slumber for upwards of thirty years, they were enabled triumphantly, as they supposed, to point to two releases of the debt, written in Korans, and signed and sealed by Soojah. Thus fortified, they declared to Colonel Pottinger, our agent at Hyderabad, that "they were sure the Governor-General did not intend to make them pay again for what they had already bought and obtained, in the most binding way, a receipt in full"--a mark of confidence which Pottinger was instructed to demolish without delay. Nor was this the only difficulty that the passage through Sindh promised to present. In the treaty which had