On my return to India, my position as Magistrate and Collector at Hooghly, near Calcutta, gave me the control, not only of criminal courts, but of the jail, and of the modern Department for Registration of Deeds of all sorts, and among minor duties the payment of Government pensions. Registration, of course, appealed most strongly to my desires, but the Sub-Registrar and his clerks had to be trained, and meanwhile the few pensioners enabled me to break the ice myself. I was not a little anxious lest, officially introduced, Hindus might take alarm for their caste. The memory of the greased cartridges of the Mutiny, so near Hooghly, was indelible. In private experiments I had never met any such difficulty, but the old lesson had been a severe one, and I thought it well, when acting officially, to take every precaution. I was careful, therefore, from the first ostentatiously to employ Hindus to take the impressions wanted; using, as if a matter of course, the pad and the ink made by one of themselves from the very seed-oil and lamp-black which were in constant use for the office seals in the several departments. The glad approval of the pensioners was a great pleasure to me, and made the other registration work astonishingly easy. The clerks took to it unhesitatingly, and enjoyed the fun of explaining the 'Sahib's hikmat'. No one ever hesitated to do as he was told, or to take away duplicates for talk at home. The process of registration at that time was regulated by a late law devised to afford the best security then possible for the genuineness of deeds, as far as attestation went. The signatures, whether in full or by caste mark, or by cross, or, in the case of women mostly, by touching the paper with the tip of the finger wetted with ink from the clerk's pen (see p. 35), were always made in the presence and under the eye of the Registrar, who, in most cases, had to rely on the sworn evidence of witnesses attesting their personal knowledge of the executant. The Registrar was, of course, responsible for using his intelligence in each case to prevent imposture. His part of the work was never impeached, that I know, in Bengal; nevertheless, fraudulent attempts did still come to light. Signatures were still denied; personations in presenting false deeds did take place, either to swindle, or, in one case, to fabricate an alibi. As long as I was at Hooghly I was quite satisfied that no will or other deed registered there with the new safeguard would ever be repudiated by the actual executant. I have had to think otherwise since then, because many years afterwards a man (in another district) who had given his finger-print before a Registrar repudiated it. He was summoned to give his evidence on oath. It was found that he had cut off the joints of his fingers, hoping to defeat justice by corrupting the witnesses so as to prove that he was _not_ the man they had recognized before the Registrar. The High