The Kotwali guard with me gave a good deal of trouble through their thieving propensities. When I tried to fix the theft on them, for they never let themselves be caught red-handed, they would in turn accuse one or other of my servants, and by all combining their evidence, would show that one had seen the servant do it, and another one would bring the man he had sold the stolen article to, and so on, until they made up a strong case. That the servants stole things if left to themselves I knew, but I had made a rule that each man was responsible for the articles in his charge, and had to make good anything lost, and this I enforced, so that a servant would not be likely to steal and sell that for which he had to pay double the amount he could sell it for. About this time, when I was endeavouring to stop the thefts which just then were very frequent, a particularly bad lot of sepoys being on guard at the time, the Kotwal was evidently informed of my endeavours, for one of my servants was taken to prison accused of stealing two teapots from a tea-seller in the public garden close by, and some of the Kotwali sepoys with me gave evidence that they saw him sell the teapots to a shopkeeper in the bazar, and brought forward the shopkeeper and the teapots as evidence. The matter being taken before the Amir, the servant was ordered to be put in prison, and the Amir wrote to me to be careful what sort of men I got for servants, because, if a man was a thief, he might on occasion become a murderer, and it was dangerous for me to have such men about me. Having thus, as the Kotwal intended, prejudiced the Amir’s mind against my servants, any complaint I was likely to make of his sepoys’ stealing would not be listened to, when they would all swear that one of my own servants was guilty. Concerning the theft of teapots just mentioned, I knew the servant to be guiltless, for both before the time of the supposed theft he happened to be with me for some hours, and after that until late at night, helping me while I made a bookshelf. Eventually I got the man released from prison, but he would not come back to my service, fearing, he said, the enmity of the sepoys. However, they followed their vindictive custom of not letting a man alone whom they had once accused, and got him back in prison some short time after, where, like many another, he disappeared.