In another letter the Amir received about this time from the Indian Government, he told me that it was written that he had been faithful for twenty years, and yet in the same letter it was also written that he was buying too much war material, and that the Parliament in England would perhaps get suspicious. He could not reconcile these two statements, and said he came to the country as ruler without arms, and was recognized and acknowledged as Amir by the English, and his first act as ruler was to help them in providing for General Roberts’ army on its march from Kabul to Kandahar by giving orders all along the route to the maliks, and others in authority, to bring in provisions for the English army at each camping place, and in no way to molest them, whereby the English were enabled to march rapidly and without trouble to Kandahar. According to his treaty with the English it was necessary for them to furnish him with the latest arms to enable him to stand as her ally between her and Russia; but, instead of having them given to him, he had bought war material himself, and was now told not to do so. When the Russians extended their railway to Khuskh, they asked him to take advantage of it by trading that way, and he sent a copy of the letter to the Indian Government, asking what answer he should give, and they replied, “Give no answer;” but he was forced to reply or it might end in trouble or war, so he replied to the Russians that they had constructed this railway without consulting him, and had they done so in time he would have asked his merchants and people their opinion and what they wished, but they had made the railway for their own convenience, and his country did not want it, as their camels and pack-horses were sufficient for their own needs. He said he sent a copy of his reply to the Indian Government, who wrote back to say he had done well. He said he did not blame the English officials for what they wrote, because they were under the orders of the Parliament, but his idea of the Parliament was that it was like the Kabul public hamam (Turkish bath), where many are speaking at once, and the reverberations of sound from the big dome overhead mingles one man’s talk with that of others, so that all sequence of speech is lost in the confusion of sounds.