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 KHE 279 make room for the roads which pass through the plain, piercing the forest towards Gola and Bhira. Nothing can be more beautiful than the woodland glades which are met with in traversing these jungles. Wherever the high lands are level, and much elevated, the sál abounds to the exclusion of all other trees; but on the slopes and hollows pípal, dhák, karaunda, with an infinite variety of creepers and undergrowth, render it impossible even for an elephant to force its way. Even the sál forest although monotonous has a verdure and slender grace all its own. The young trees rise dense and straight and evenly sowu over the surface, each bursting out with little branches of leaves from its roots to the topmost boughs. The intense greeu, which prevails during the greater part of the year, yields in March to a brassy and then a copper tint. Then the ground begins to be strewed with dead leaves, while the ripening fruit and the yellow foliage of the fall appears intermingled with the young buds of the ing spring. This part of Kukra Mailáni is not unhealthy, except when the rotting vegetable matter infects the water in April. As grazing grounds the openings in the forest are very valuable for agricultural purposes ; but hardly any of the numerous grantees, to whom Government presented or sold 350 square miles in this neighbourhood, have succeeded in bringing their woods under cultivation. In Mailáni was the great fight between the Sayyads of Barwar and the Gaurs of Chandra, described in the Kheri district article. In Kukra, Ali Bakhsh Khan, the lord of the manor, built himself a small brick castle. At the gate of the family burying ground there is a flat toinb, that of Ali Bakhsh Khan's father, who killed his brother in order to obtain the estate, and whose body after death was placed at the gate, so that all true Musalmans on entering might show their horror by trampling on his dust. Undeterred by the fate of the fratricide his son committed a worse crime. The lands of Kukra had never been measured. Ali Bakhsh Khan was holding at a very moderate rent, and the chakladar wished to survey the estate and determine its capabilities. The surveyors, four in number, arrived at Kukra, and were hospitably entertained by Ali Bakhsh Khan. At dead of night the villagers, who lived near the castle, were aroused by the fire of musketry and shouts of már már (kill kill). All the wretched men were murdered in their sleep, and when morning dawned not a living being was seen in the villages; all fled to the forest dreading the vengeance of Government for the murder of a revenue official, Ali Bakhsh Khan had committed the crime in a spirit of mad passion against the servants of Government who were only doing their duty. He had no idea of profiting by or concealing the murder; in fact, he knew it would be his ruin and that of his family. His estate was seized; he never again saw his family, but wandered as an outlaw in the forests till in his turn he was stabbed at Muhamdi by the son of one of those whom he had cut off. This man had incessantly tracked his father's murderer for fifteen years. The estate was mortgaged to Rája Lone Singh, who built a fort at Kukra, and is alleged to have buried his treasures-threeelephantloads of gold muhars—inits neigh- bourhood after the fort of Mitauli was taken in the mutiny of 1857. It is said that he killed the elephant drivers in the forest in order to secure their silence. Similarly Roshannagar was the scene of a dark tragedy. Its owner,