the flat of the valley, and only requires smoothing, and removing boulders, so that a few days will see this, the last piece of the road, completed. For the rest of the distance the road is everywhere as good as a bye-road in an out-of-the-way district at home. In many places it is very much better. Up the passes at Sooro and Rayray Guddy it is really an excellent road. The vast boulders, which I described upon the occasion of my first passing through it, are either shattered to pieces by blasting, or are surmounted by the road being raised by a gradual incline. Too much praise cannot be given to the Bombay Sappers and Miners, who have carried out these works. The same party, after finishing these passes, have now just completed a broad zigzag road from the bottom of the pass up to the Senafe plain. This was before the most trying part of the whole journey, now it is a road up which one might drive in a carriage and pair, and which reminds one of the last zigzags upon the summits of the Mount Cenis and St. Gothard passes. The whole of the works I have described are at once samples of skilful engineering and of unremitting exertion. No one who passed through six weeks ago would have believed that so much could possibly be effected in so short a time. Next only to the Bombay Sappers credit must be given to the Beloochee regiment, one wing of which under Major Beville at Sooro, and the other under Captain Hogg at Rayray Guddy, have made the road along those places where blasting was not required. The Beloochees are a remarkably fine regiment, and work with a willingness and good-will which are beyond praise. Great regret is expressed on all sides that they have not been selected to accompany the 33d regiment upon its advance, especially as they are armed with Enfield rifles. The Beloochees are deservedly one of the most popular regiments in the Indian service, and there is an _esprit de corps_—a feeling of personal attachment between men and officers, and a pride on the part of the latter to belong to so good a regiment—which the present extraordinary and unsatisfactory state of the Indian service renders altogether out of the question in the regular native regiments. There an officer forms no part of the regiment. He belongs to it for the time being, but if he goes home for leave, he will upon his return be posted in all probability to some other regiment. In this way all _esprit de corps_, all traces of mutual good feeling between men and officers, is entirely done away with. How such a system could ever have been devised, and how, once devised, it has ever been allowed to continue, is one of those extraordinary things which no civilian, and no military man under the rank of colonel, can understand.