Page:The life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (IA b21778401).pdf/101

Rh a little my "Griffin" thoughts was to note the unpleasant difference between villages under English rule and those belonging to "His Highness the Gaikwar" or cowkeeper; the penury of the former and the prosperity of the latter. Mr. Boyd, the then Resident at the local court, soon enlightened me upon the evils of our unelastic rule of "smart Collectors," who cannot and dare not make any allowance for deficient rainfall or injured crops, and it is better to have something to lose, and to lose it even to the extent "of being ousted of possessions and disseized of freehold," with the likely hope of gaining it again, than to own nothing worth plundering.

The end of the march introduced me to my corps, the 18th Regiment, Bombay Native Infantry, whose head-quarters were in Gujarat, one wing being stationed at Mhow, on the Bengal frontier.

The officer commanding, Captain James (C.V.), called upon me at the Travellers' bungalow, the rudimentary Inn which must satisfy the strange in India, suggesting the while such sad contrast, and bore me off to his bungalow, formally presented me at Mess—then reduced to eight members besides myself—and the Assistant-Surgeon Arnott put me in the way of lodging myself. The regimental Mess, with its large cool Hall and punkahs, its clean napery and bright silver, its servants each standing behind his master's chair, and the cheroots and hookahs which appeared with the disappearance of the "table"-cloth, was a pleasant surprise, the first sight of comfortable home-life I had seen since landing at Bombay. Not so the Subalterns' bungalow, which gave the idea of a dog-hole at which British Ponto would turn up his civilized nose. The business of the day was mainly goose-step and studying the drill book, and listening to such equivocal words of command as "Tandelees" (stand at ease) and "Fiz-bagnat" (fix bayonets). Long practice with the sword, which I had began seriously at the age of twelve, sometimes taking three lessons a day, soon eased my difficulties, and led to the study of native swordsmanship, whose grotesqueness and buffoonery can be rivalled only by its insufficiency.

The wrestling, however, was another matter, and not a few natives in my Company had at first the advantage of me, and this induced a trial of Indian training, which consisted mainly of washing down the balls of Gur (unrefined sugar) with bowls of hot milk hotly spiced. The result was that in a week I was blind with bile. Another set of lessons suggested by common sense, was instruction by a