SIR,—I hope I am in time to draw the attention of the Government to the _Bahadur_[1] style in which the selection to the ‘Indian Yeomanry Corps’ of Volunteers is being conducted. Because a man is the son of his father, and owns a few ponies and a few hundred rupees, is he to be given the preference as a fighting unit? There are to-day in India, even in the city of Calcutta, men of unquestionable merit, men who are sons and the recipients of a heritage of blood shed in England’s and her Most Gracious Majesty’s cause from fathers who had bled and died for England and England’s prestige, and I beg to ask you, Sir, are these men to be shelved to suit the convenience of a few planters? I am not a planter, and, as an outsider, I put my claims forward as a test of merit. I am willing to shoot a match up the range with the best man selected from Behar, run him a given distance, ride him on strange nags (catch weights), and in the end with my weight and other recommendations beat him. [Illustration: _Photo: Bourne & Shepherd_ BEHAR CONTINGENT OF LUMSDEN’S HORSE ] There is quite a ring of mediaeval chivalry about that challenge to ‘shoot up the range.’ One cannot mistake its blood-thirsty significance, and perhaps it is lucky for the Champion of Behar that he did not take up the gauntlet thus ruthlessly thrown down. It will be noticed that this duel, after the manner suggested by one of Bret Harte’s heroes, was to precede all other events in the prolonged ordeal; and imagination shudders at the picture of awful slaughter that would have been wrought, as the picked marksmen of Behar and Hyderabad and Oudh and Assam went down one by one, if they had dared to face the deadly rifle of that truculent citizen of Calcutta, without getting a chance to prove whether he could run or ride. Happily, the selected two hundred and fifty kept their heads, so that the trial by single combat never came off; but one must hope that a place was found in Lumsden’s Horse for the self-confident challenger, and that he proved as formidable on the field as in a printed column. Readers may scan the names of troopers, whose occupations before enlistment are all given in the Appendix, and yet be left speculating whether or not the writer of that letter was among the chosen after all. He will not be found in the first or second section of Company A, composed almost to a man of indigo-planters, or in the third section, whose tea-planters, mainly from Assam, have not a townsman among them; and the planters who make up an overwhelming majority of three sections in Company B would equally disclaim all knowledge of the fire-eating citizen. Can it be that he figures in the more casual fourth section of either company, under the vague designation of a ‘gentleman’ or a ‘journalist’? A little levity may be pardoned now in reference to a matter which, at the time, aroused some acrimony. All that, however, was