Macgillicuddy should have stuck to sword’s play, and he might have come off in his second duel as well as in his first; as it was, the civilian placed a ball and a part of Mac’s gold repeater in his stomach. A remarkable circumstance attended this shot, an account of which I sent home to the “Philosophical Transactions:” the surgeon had extracted the ball, and was going off, thinking that all was well, when the gold repeater struck thirteen in poor Macgillicuddy’s abdomen. I suppose that the works must have been disarranged in some way by the bullet, for the repeater was one of Barraud’s, never known to fail before, and the circumstance occurred at _seven_ o’clock.[1] I could continue, almost _ad infinitum_, an account of the wars which this Helen occasioned, but the above three specimens will, I should think, satisfy the peaceful reader. I delight not in scenes of blood, Heaven knows, but I was compelled in the course of a few weeks, and for the sake of this one woman, to fight nine duels myself, and I know that four times as many more took place concerning her. I forgot to say that Jowler’s wife was a half-caste woman, who had been born and bred entirely in India, and whom the Colonel had married from the house of her mother, a native. There were some singular rumours abroad regarding this latter lady’s history: it was reported that she was the daughter of a native Rajah, and had been carried off by a poor English subaltern in Lord Clive’s time. The young man was killed very soon after, and left his child with its mother. The black Prince forgave his daughter and bequeathed to her a handsome sum of money. I suppose that it was on this account that Jowler married Mrs. J., a creature who had not, I do believe, a Christian name, or a single Christian quality: she was a hideous, bloated, yellow creature, with a beard, black teeth, and red eyes: she was fat, lying, ugly, and stingy—she hated and was hated by all the world, and by her jolly husband as devoutly as by any other. She did not pass a month in the year with him, but spent most of her time with her native friends. I wonder how she could have given birth to so lovely a creature as her daughter. This woman was of course with the Colonel when Julia arrived, and the spice of the devil in her daughter’s composition was most carefully nourished and fed by her. If Julia had been a flirt before, she was a downright jilt now; she set the whole cantonment by the ears; she made wives jealous and husbands miserable; she caused all those duels of which I have discoursed already, and yet such was the fascination of THE WITCH that I still thought her an angel. I made court to the nasty mother in order to be near the daughter; and I listened untiringly to Jowler’s interminable dull stories, because I was occupied all the time in watching the graceful movements of Miss Julia.