much frequented by hunters, they know how to take care of themselves by not leaving the bush in the daytime. The favourite tree for deer to clean their horns on is the celery pine, called "Tanika " in Maori; and by noticing where the celery pines were most rubbed, I came to the conclusion that the favourite place for stags to spend the warm days of February in the shade was nearly at the top of the timber line. There are two troublesome things in camp. Imprimis, the blue-bottle flies, or blow-flies, which blow their eggs on one's blankets, or anything woollen, At night sometimes the camperout is compelled to use lanterns, for the blue-bottles keep flying into an open candle, extinguishing the light. Then again there is a little sand-fly, in shape like a minute bee, which bites so viciously as to render a camp pitched anywhere near water untenable in the daytime. Let me say in conclusion that the pleasures of deer-stalking in New Zealand are not sufficiently appreciated by British sportsmen. Furthermore, I feel sure that when the New Zealand Government realises the benefit it would be to the Colony to attract many more British stalkers, most of whom are men of means, the latter will be encouraged in every possible way, especially in that of fixing the deer-stalking season a month earlier. FROM SEPOY TO SUBAHDAR. IN 1873 there appeared, from the hands of a local printer at Lahore, a book of the above name, being the translation of an autobiography in the vernacular of one Seetaram, a pensioned subahdar in the service of the Honourable East India Company. To be a subahdar, let alone a pensioned subahdar, in that service, was to have attained close on three-score years and ten, as you may tell from the tally of ages on the memorial over the long trench graves at Chillianwallah; and the period of Seetaram's active service was close on half a century. He rested from his labours soon after the Great Mutiny, in loyalty and honour, and he joined the army before the Nepal and Maratha-cum-PinThat is to say, his services covered the period of all the great Indian campaigns of the English except those of General Lake and Sir Arthur Wellesley. dari wars. reprint was made in 1880, also by a local firm in Lahore. It attracted Lord Kitchener's attention a few years ago, as full of useful lessons which still held good for those who would see below the surface, and who have to deal with the Indian soldier of to-day. It has just been republished in Calcutta, edited by Lieut.Colonel Phillot of the Board of Examiners, and also translated into Urdu (it originally was written in Hindi) under his supervision. It has also been made part of the official textbooks for the examination in Urdu by the Higher Standard. The wisdom that it contains will not, therefore, be lost on the rising generation, while its very allusions should stimulate interest in the history of the British in India in the eventful first half of the nineteenth century. His autobiography would therefore be a storehouse of sidelights from, to some extent, beneath the harrow, as Colonel Norgate of the Bengal Staff Corps, who was the original tran slator, recognised, preface to the and wrote a edition of 1873 though it would appear that an earlier translation of some kind was made, as it is referred to in Colonel The fascination which first moved Colonel Norgate to translate the book does not fade as time rolls on; and its simple reflections and ingenuous deductions, as well as the sidelights that it throws on events of which we now only read in official histories, have a peculiar charm. In sending his work to the first trans lator, Colonel Norgate, Seetaram says that he has received seven wounds and six war medals; and if half of what he tells be true, he certainly Norgate himself received it deserved these latter. 'Times' of 1863. from the author in 1861. A VOL. CXCII.-NO. MCLXII. Seetaram, a Brahmin of Oude of a fighting clan, was born near the one-time Rajput centre of Adjudya, the son of Gangaram Pandy. Men of the Pandy olan served largely in the old army of the Bengal Line; and it will be remembered how Mangal Pandy, the first mutineer, was responsible for the bestowal of the generic name of "Pandy" on the mutineers. When seventeen years of age, after a careful and orthodox upbringing in the house of the family priest, the young Brahmin's love of adventure was stirred by the return from the wars of his maternal uncle, a jemadar in a line battalion of the Com pany. The lad at once caught the scarlet fever badly, and longed, to the horror of his mother and the family priest, to shoulder a pike also. The father having a pending lawsuit, and mindful of the interest at the court of Oude which service with the British conferred, rather encouraged the boy's martial ardour, and a few months saw him returning with his uncle to his cantonment at Agra. Seetaram had never seen a sahib, and had the wildest ideas concerning them. His first introduction to one was seeing the adjutant measuring recruits in the verandah of his bungalow, and his surprise at hearing the adjutant address his uncle in the vernacular was great. His next adventure is the interview with the small red-faced old man with the eye of a hawk, who he finds is the colonel of a thousand men. In every case he is struck with the con sideration with which his uncle the jemadar is received. In a parenthesis he here bewails the fact that the new sahibs are not like the old sahibs, and can't talk the language as well as they could. It is always the same story in the East, the same now as a hundred years ago, when Seetaram took the shilling-the new sahibs are not like the old sahibs. You hear the same in the clubs,the new soldier is not like the old soldier-the new rank and file are not like the old rank and file, and yet every one knows that for activity and physique the old regiments were not in it with the new ones. We need not follow the young Brahmin through his recruit stages, save to note the delight with which he left the recruit squad to don his red coat, boys are much like another whether the skin be white or brown; but it is interesting to note that then as now, and then as ever, some sahib stood out in the regiment as a wonder and a power and a demigod. In Seetaram's regiment this wonderful Englishman 66 was Burampeel Sahib (he cannot be traced, but it may have been Bloomfield), and he at once became object of intense veneration to the lad, and remained so all his life. These wonderful Burampeel Sahibs are the men who enable the English to lead alien races to victory, from the banks of the Nile to the Great Wall of China, from burning desert to perpetual snow, come rain come shine, and the secret is the gift of the gods. It is an to be noticed that when a corps wants to mutiny, it is the first business of the instigators to get rid of the Burampeels, lest their influence counteracts the poison. That, however, is a story that comes much later, and we may notice that the rest of Seetaram's sahibs appeared to him very ordinary sahibs, who had nicknames in the ranks, such as the Oont Sahib (camel), the Nawab Sahib, the Damn Sahib, &o., but no one ever dared give Burampeel Sahib a nickname. Here Seetaram has a refleotion to make. Since the Mutiny the Lalcoatee (red coat -viz., Queen's Army) officers do not treat the Indian soldiers in the way they used, which he admits is small wonder. Even when he was one of the force that relieved Lucknow, he was a "d-d black pig," and recalls how when he made chappaties in Cabul for officers of the 13th and 41st Foot, it was "Jack Sepoy was a d-d good fellow." Seetaram says he was always on good terms with European soldiers, who used to treat them well, and why wouldn't they, for "did we not do all their hard work? We took their guards in the heat, we stood sentry over their rum casks. But the new soldiers from Europe are not so fine as the old ones." And he has heard that the Russ cannon killed all the big ones. "In the old days the 17th Foot called us brothers, the 16th Lancers never walked near our chulas (cooking-places)." The old man's recollections of the the are Nepal or Ghurka war merely those of the young private in the ranks his chief memories being of the repulse at the hill-fort of Nala-pani, where forty-eight men of his own corps were killed and two whole companies of white soldiers, whose comrades, he remarks, were nothing daunted, and came on again "like young cooks." Burampeel Sahib, to the great grief of the regiment, had an arrow through the chest and had to be invalided to England. After the final successful campaign of a rather disastrous war, we find the following reflection: "The English respect brave men and do not kill them. Is not this curious, for is not 8 brave man the most dangerous enemy?... The wounded snake can kill as long as life remains, If your enemy is not worth killing he is not worth fighting with." And thus the philosophy of the East, and as a recent Indian historian of the Mutiny has put it, when talking of the massacres of the women and children, "Would I kill a serpent and leave the eggs?" Which, after all, is simple human nature, without the shadow of the Prince of Peace. Of all the curses under which the peasantry and traders of Hindustan groaned, and from which the British saved them, though now they would forget it, that of the Pindaris was perhaps the worst. The break-up of the Mogul armies had given rise to a race of free-lances, buccaneers, and masterless men, who had formed themselves The always seemed known to the into bands under various had better information than leaders, and lived at their ease the British. However secret on the countryside. They the British movements, they raided with merciless and fiendish cruelty for hundreds of miles round the fortified places of refuge that they had made for themselves on the banks of the Nerbudda and in the more inaccessible parts of Central India. At last, in 1816, the Company and its allies could stand it no longer, and the Marquess of Hastings collected a large army at various points surrounding the Pindari districts, with a view to exterminating the nest once and for all. It is not necessary to deal here with the intrigues and cabals that brought several of the Maratha Chiefs into the field against us instead of assisting us to the good government and welfare of their own and neighbouring lands. Suffice it to say that the Pindari war developed into a Maratha war, and to the war marched Seetaram, a young though fully trained sepoy of the Honourable Company's Bengal Line. Wounded and left in the jungle in one of the lesser skirmishes, he was rescued by villagers. Returning by a good chance to his regiment, after thirteen days' absence, with a bullet in his back, he succeeded, he relates, in winning for the first time the approbation of his adjutant by not losing his musket and ammunition, —an an interesting light on the fact that the way to an adjutant's heart has always been the same. Seetaram tells us also the old story, that the Pindaris always his the Seetaram remarks, "Five years' savings were thus expended, but who can combat destiny!" Sick furlough over, Seetaram rejoins, to find his beloved Burampeel Sahib back from Europe. He remarks, "I have never seen more than two sahibs like Burampeel Sahib," and they were asal Belaitee (real English), not sahibs from the hilly island." The allusion here is not a clear one: possibly the |