that he had been thinking it over carefully, and that he thought, on the whole, as I was so fond of music, that I had done right in going. I am not likely to forget him thus humbling himself to me. There is a similar story of Darwin :

'He had,' says Sir Francis Darwin, a horror of drinking, and constantly warned his boys that any one might be led into drinking too much. I remember, in my innocence as a small boy, asking him if he had ever been tipsy; and he answered very gravely that he was ashamed to say he had once drunk too much at Cambridge. I was much impressed, so that I know now the place where the question was asked.'

These are the impressions which endure when other impressions, most deep for a time, have long faded off the surface of memory. Tell your children of their faults, and they will forget what you are saying; tell them of your own, and they will remember the very place where you said it half a century ago. Besides, it is not as if we could hide our faults; they stick out, most of them, like the broken ribs of an old umbrella. The reference here is to the first chapter of The Little White Bird '—' That strange short hour of the day, when every mother stands revealed before her little son.'

Against all these pages of good advice to parents, one objection makes itself heard, knocking persistently, like the tassel of a blind in a draught. Do stand up, it says; don't grovel, don't let the children see you like that, looking so silly. Teach them self-confidence, self-help, strength of will, and a firm grip on the realities of life. Do get up, out of the gutter. You are not setting them a good example.

But facts are facts, wherever we find them; and pearls of great value, a whole string of them, were found not long ago in the gutter. Of course, we must set a good example to the children; but the best way to ensure that, is to set them the example of somebody better than ourselves. Any good example will do, provided it is not our own, but a better article. My dear, I will gladly set your example before our children, if you will kindly set before them

mine.

STEPHEN PAGET.

THE ILLUSTRIOUS GARRISON.

FROM time to time chance, circumstance, or design have applied epithets to men and to events which on the stretched forefinger of all time sparkle for ever.' In 1842 Lord Ellenborough, GovernorGeneral of the East Indies, giving the rein to his inherent admiration for deeds military, applied, in his general order announcing the belated successes in Afghanistan, the term Illustrious Garrison' to the troops which held Jellalabad for many weary months. The army scoffed somewhat, as armies will, just as the army on the Modder talked of Buller the Ferryman, and the army in Natal scoffed at that relieving Kimberley, and as the troops on the heights of Inkerman scoffed at the Light Brigade. It is the way of armies and is not all evil. The Illustrious Garrison' was better known as 'Sale's Brigade' at the time, but later the Governor-General's epithet stuck in men's minds when memory, as to the particular event that had evoked it, faded.

H.M. 13th Foot, now the Somersetshire Light Infantry, carry to this day among their honourable devices the mural crown, that stock heraldic emblem to commemorate a siege. They alone of that garrison still figure in the Army List. The gallant, patient, faithful 35th Native Infantry who, like Clive's sepoys at Arcot, gave up their rations to the Europeans, blew up with nine-tenths of the Bengal Army in that cataclysm of '57, carrying away with them a century of history. Backhouse's Mountain Train, Ferris' Jezailchis, Broadfoot's Sappers, remain but in the pages of military annals. The famous 13th alone are still in being.

How the Illustrious Garrison' earned the epithet, and why, is a thrice-told tale, but one that fades constantly. It is full of interesting sidelights, too, on the wars of the English, and worthy of being re-studied.

How and why the British came to be in Afghanistan at all is a long story, and one which had its beginning half a century before. In August 1798 there was published in London, by

one John Fairburn, of 146 The Minories, a coloured map styled as follows:

'Fairburn's New Chart,
Exhibiting

THE ROUTE OF GENERAL BUONAPARTE

in the Mediterranean Sea.

With the countries through which the French Army must
pass, viz:

Egypt and the Red Sea and the Gulf of Persia
TO MANGALORE

In the territory of Tippoo Sahib in the East Indies.

At that time, and in the years immediately following it, Napoleon Buonaparte and the Emperor of Russia were making plans for the invasion of India by land, coupling with the original proposals the intention of coming to the assistance of Citizen Tippoo.' From that day onwards the Bear has ever cast his shadow forward on the borders of India. The defence of India was the subject of many memoranda and pamphlets so far back as the opening years of the nineteenth century, and by 1835 was the subject of anxious study for statesmen and strategists. More immediate, at the beginning for that century, however, was the danger from Afghanistan and the Dourannie Empire. The Emperor, Zeman Shah, was constantly threatening another invasion, and half India looked for him to help drive the English to the sea. For many centuries the men of the North had poured into Hindostan at will, and for the last fifty years the Dourannis had been struggling with the Marathas for the source of power. Russia and Afghanistan together therefore had long loomed large, and these facts should be borne in mind when we try to gauge the impressions of the day. In those early years of the nineteenth century, too, our activities in Persia had been considerable, directed, above all things, to countering the French interest and ambition. The constant wars between the Afghans and the Sikhs and the requirements of commerce in opening up the navigation of the Indus all combined to make us sensitive, even so far back as the thirties, to the trend of events in Afghanistan and beyond.

In 1837 Mahomed Shah, the Shah-in-Shah of Persia, sent a large army to conquer Herat, with Russian officers attached to it. Shah Kamran, the Viceroy of the Province, one of the few of the original blood royal of Kabul, determined to hold the city, and embarked on a defence which lasted from November 1837 to September 1838,

when a threat of a British expedition in the Persian Gulf, and the persistence of the defence, into which Eldred Pottinger had so opportunely dropped, caused the Persians to raise the siege. In 1836 Captain Alexander Burnes proceeded to Sind and Kabul on a diplomatic and commercial mission. Friendly though his reception at Kabul was, nothing definite resulted, and there was also present one Nikovitch, an energetic young Russian avant-courier. Eventually the failure of Burnes' mission, the attack by the Persians on Herat, and a desire to create a strong and friendly Afghanistan, resulted in the treaty between the British, Ranjeet Singh Maharajah of the Sikhs, and Shah Shoojah, the exiled ruler of Kabul, to place the latter on the throne of his fathers as an ally and protégé of the British.

How the British Army crawled from Ferozepore on the Sutlej, where it had assembled, down the Indus to Sukkhur, up the Bolan to Quetta, and thence to Kandahar, hampered by want of carriage, immense baggage, and cholera, may be read in any history of the time. Once in the granary and fruit garden of Kandahar, the now united forces from Bengal and Bombay recovered from the fatigues and disasters of their journey, while the exiled King was by way of taking over his new provinces. The next stage was the advance on Kabul, in which the capture of the historic fortress of Ghuzni by a coup de main was a brilliant episode. During the whole of the long circuitous route from the borders of the Punjab to Kabul the storming of Ghuzni was the only important military action, though there had been skirmishes and harassments galore.

The Army of the Indus, as the force 'was called, started from Ferozepore in December-9,500 fighting men, 38,000 followers, and 30,000 camels. The baggage of the officers was immense, while the military authorities had no knowledge of how to reduce it. It was the end of April before the force reached Kandahar, having been joined at Sukkhur by a force from Bombay. With the Army had advanced also the Shah's Contingent, a force hastily raised in the northern cantonments of India from indifferent material, commanded by British officers lent to the Shah's service. It was not till the first week in August 1839 that the Shah and Sir John Keane arrived at Kabul. Dost Mahomed, usually termed 'the Dost,' the popular elected ruler of Afghanistan, fled, abandoning a large park of artillery, while the Shah re-entered his capital and the palace fort of the Bala Hissar, from which his subjects had expelled him years before.

The object of the expedition had therefore been attained,

The Shah sat on the throne of his fathers. His Contingent garrisoned his capital and his outposts, and had been increased by enlistments of his own sub'ects. But it was not possible to abandon him to his own resources. The methods of an Afghan ruler to those who belonged to opposing factions alone tied our hands. While we were there we could not acquiesce in Afghan methods. Yet if we foist an unpopular ruler on a turbulent people, and are too nice to let him strengthen his position by the only means he and his enemies recognise, we must take the consequences. The consequences were that for many reasons we could not abandon the Shah to his own resources, nor could we avoid appearing the real wielders of sovereignty. We reduced the costly army of occupation, but still had to garrison the country with our own troops. A British force escorted the whole of the Shah's large female establishment across the Punjab and up the Khyber to Kabul, including the old blind Emperor, Shah Zeman, the father of Shah Shoojah. Perhaps of all the actions of that time, the one we can least understand was the despatch also of the families of our own officers and men to Kabul. Right across the alien and increasingly hostile Punjab, up the Khyber and subsequent passes to Kabul itself, went the British ladies with their nurses, and their babies, and their pianos, to the new cantonment at Kabul, and with them the families of the British and native soldiers, all by way of adding to the activity and mobility of a force isolated by several hundred miles of difficult roads from our own territory. To us in these days, who will not allow ladies even into our frontier posts, the arrangement is astounding. However, so it was. During the remainder of 1839 and through 1840 the surface was calm, and our officers at Kandahar, at Ghuzni, and at Kabul, lived the life of a cantonment as if they had been in distant Hindostan. We read in Sir Neville Chamberlain's life, of officers of the Ghuzni garrison riding into Kabul for the Christmas festivities, or for the races, as if it had been Poona or Meerut.

In 1841 the situation had become more openly menacing. The principal forces in Afghanistan were Elphinstone's brigade at Kabul, and Nott's at Kandahar, with the Contingent scattered about the province, chiefly in Kabul, and in the Kohistan or mountain tracts north of Kabul. The year had begun with everything couleur de rose. The Dost, after an unsuccessful incursion. into the Kohistan, had surrendered and had been sent to an honourable captivity in India. Towards the summer, however, risings