"Thus you have no right to be surprised, as you often are, when some notorious incapable, entrusted with an office of the highest responsibility, comes to grief. His 'Kismet,' his 'Nasib,' his star, have been in the ascendant, and he has done nothing to obscure them by personal merit, by originality, by candour, or by over-veracity. These qualities are sure to make enemies, and the millenium must dawn before your friends--private, public, or political--will look after you with the vigour and the tenacity of your foes. "But so rotten is the state, so glaring is the inefficiency, of the Indian army, that you will not be astonished to hear reports of 'organic changes' and fundamental reforms, or even to see a return to the old system. Strange to say, Lord Northbrook, the civilian, saw the necessity of reorganization. Lord Napier, the soldier, who, during the Abyssinian campaign, sent for officers to every Presidency, ignored it. Perhaps the Napierian clique took the opportunity to oppose, tooth and nail, the efforts of another service. The Shí'ahs, who, you know, abhor the Sunnis bitterly, as Roman Catholics hate Protestants, when any mode of action left to private judgment is proposed, always choose the line opposed to that taken by their heretic enemies--_raghman li-'l-Tasannun_, 'in adverse bearing to Sunniship,' as the religious formula runs. "Briefly, the sooner we convert Jacobábád into an outpost, connect it by a decent road with Shikárpúr, and station the troops at Sakhar, the better. No man in his sane senses would station his whole force upon the skirts of a province, where a troop or two suffices, without a single soldier, for support or reserve, nearer than some three hundred miles. "The defective dyke has depopulated a fine tract of country; it threatened old Sakhar, and it may even cause a complete shifting of the irrepressible river. Any exceptional freshet may burst the 'Band' and insulate Sakhar Camp, below which the inundation used to discharge; and seriously damage the working of the railway, upon which all the prosperity of the Upper Province now depends. "But dull, desolate, decayed, miserable-looking Sakhar has a future. Bad as the climate is, men live longer in it than at Shikárpúr or Jacobábád. The railway, which the engineers seem trying their hardest _not_ to make, must some day be finished; it will not only connect Sind with India, but it must also attract to itself all the outlying settlements. 'Common Sense,' again, will presently withdraw the Sind Horse from wretched malarious Jacobábád, a prison with the chance of being drowned. The occupation of Kelat will give poor old Sakhar an excellent sanitarium, and the annexation of the Unhappy Valley to the broad and fertile plains of the Panjáb will make it, I venture to predict, one of the principal stations upon the highway of commerce.